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A comment on How percentile approximation works and why it's more useful than averages. Parent comment

Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by waynecochran on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @12:50PM (#28527469)
Yeah -- std deviation has a similar problem to the mean in that it doesn't give you a full picture unless the distribution is close to normal / gaussian.
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Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by esyir on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:09PM (#28527708)
Pretty much why summary statistics often give the IQR, which gives some idea to the skew and shape of the distribution as well.

Unfortunately, BD and marketing just want a single number to show that the value is bigger and hate anything more complicated than a barchart.

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Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by djk447 on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:19PM (#28527849)
NB: Post author here.

We've been meaning to add IQR as an accessor function for these, may have to go back and do it...the frequency trails [1] stuff from Brendan Gregg also goes into some of this and it's really cool as a visualization.

[1]: https://www.brendangregg.com/FrequencyTrails/mean.html

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Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by varelaz on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @01:13PM (#28527760)
Barchart is basically your percentiles (just more of them) so why not show it? Bars and whiskers could be more complicated for them but still the same sort of data
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Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by fwip on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @05:15PM (#28531350)
Barcharts across categorical data :P

That is, the first bar is "Our Number" and the second bar is "Competitor's number."

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Re:How percentile approximation works and why it's more usef... by esyir on Tuesday September 14, 2021 @09:02PM (#28533812)
Someone clearly gets it. Variability viz and spread detracts from that clear message.
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