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Concept
Frequency (statistics)
Summary
In statistics, the frequency or absolute frequency of an event is the number of times the observation has occurred/recorded in an experiment or study. These frequencies are often depicted graphically or in tabular form.
The cumulative frequency is the total of the absolute frequencies of all events at or below a certain point in an ordered list of events.
The relative frequency (or empirical probability) of an event is the absolute frequency normalized by the total number of events:
The values of for all events can be plotted to produce a frequency distribution.
In the case when for certain , pseudocounts can be added.
A frequency distribution shows a summarized grouping of data divided into mutually exclusive classes and the number of occurrences in a class. It is a way of showing unorganized data notably to show results of an election, income of people for a certain region, sales of a product within a certain period, student loan amounts of graduates, etc. Some of the graphs that can be used with frequency distributions are histograms, line charts, bar charts and pie charts. Frequency distributions are used for both qualitative and quantitative data.
Decide the number of classes. Too many classes or too few classes might not reveal the basic shape of the data set, also it will be difficult to interpret such frequency distribution. The ideal number of classes may be determined or estimated by formula: (log base 10), or by the square-root choice formula where n is the total number of observations in the data. (The latter will be much too large for large data sets such as population statistics.) However, these formulas are not a hard rule and the resulting number of classes determined by formula may not always be exactly suitable with the data being dealt with.
Calculate the range of the data (Range = Max – Min) by finding the minimum and maximum data values. Range will be used to determine the class interval or class width.
Decide the width of the classes, denoted by h and obtained by (assuming the class intervals are the same for all classes).
Official source
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Related concepts (16)
Empirical probability
In probability theory and statistics, the empirical probability, relative frequency, or experimental probability of an event is the ratio of the number of outcomes in which a specified event occurs to the total number of trials, i.e., by means not of a theoretical sample space but of an actual experiment. More generally, empirical probability estimates probabilities from experience and observation. Given an event A in a sample space, the relative frequency of A is the ratio \tfrac m n, m being the number of outcomes in which the event A occurs, and n being the total number of outcomes of the experiment.
Histogram
A histogram is an approximate representation of the distribution of numerical data. The term was first introduced by Karl Pearson. To construct a histogram, the first step is to "bin" (or "bucket") the range of values—that is, divide the entire range of values into a series of intervals—and then count how many values fall into each interval. The bins are usually specified as consecutive, non-overlapping intervals of a variable. The bins (intervals) must be adjacent and are often (but not required to be) of equal size.
Empirical distribution function
In statistics, an empirical distribution function (commonly also called an empirical cumulative distribution function, eCDF) is the distribution function associated with the empirical measure of a sample. This cumulative distribution function is a step function that jumps up by 1/n at each of the n data points. Its value at any specified value of the measured variable is the fraction of observations of the measured variable that are less than or equal to the specified value.