Plots and basic stats

Question 1

what is continuous data?

Answer 1

infinite range of values (can be measured with increased accuracy)
eg: plant height, body mass, time spent foraging

Question 2

what is discrete data?

Answer 2

finite number of values (cannot be measured with increased accuracy, not all values are possible)
eg: number of butterflies on one flower, number of legs, number of leaves

Question 3

what is ordinal data?

Answer 3

Ranking or relative order, usually is a transformation of a numerical variable
eg: Plant size groups (small, medium and tall), letter marks for your module

Question 4

what is nominal data?

Answer 4

Attributes that cannot be numerically measured
eg: Sex, type of species, type of habitat

Question 5

what descriptive statistics look at central tendancy?

Answer 5

• arithmetic mean
• median
• mode

Question 6

what descriptive statistics look at dispersion and variability?

Answer 6

• range
• interquartile range
• variance
• standard deviation
• coefficient of variation

Question 7

what does Exploratory data analysis summarise?

Answer 7

the main characteristics of data often visually to help you learn about the data before and during analysis

Question 8

what does Exploratory data analysis help see?

Answer 8

• patterns
• errors
• to check for assumptions

Question 9

what type of data are histograms used for?

Answer 9

values of one numerical variable

Question 10

what types of data are boxplots used for?

Answer 10

Plotting values of one numerical variable and one categorical variable (numerical summaries for several levels/groups/treatments)

Question 11

what types of data do bar plots display?

Answer 11

Plotting summary values (counts, mean, proportion) of numerical variable for levels of categorical variable

Question 12

what tyoes of data do scattergraphs display?

Answer 12

Plotting values of two numerical variables (and potentially categorical variables)