From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data
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Calculate sums and means
From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data
Calculate sums and means
- [Instructor] One of the things you find when dealing with data is there's a lot of noise. And one of your big problems, one of the big challenges, is to try to find the signal hidden in the noise. And it turns out that one of the really helpful ways to do that is to average, is to sum things or average things. Because by aggregating, it makes it easier to isolate the true signal. Let me give you an interesting example of this is accuracy by aggregate. And here we have a jar of jelly beans. And maybe you've done something like this where you ask people to guess how many jelly beans are in a jar, and you're going to give a prize to whoever is most accurate. So everybody writes down their estimate, and then they put it on a piece of paper and they put that in a bowl, and you're going to pick somebody who gets it the most accurate. Well, it turns out that your best approach actually is to take all of the guesses that people give and then average those guesses. So not an individual guess…
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