Lesson 2

Lesson 2: Outliers

Focus

Many people aspire to be actors. If you think of actors such as Johnny Depp, who grossed $100 million in 2010, and Angelina Jolie, who grossed $23.5 million in 2010, it sounds like a great career idea.

Consider though that most actors must take a second job to maintain a reasonable standard of living and act more for the passion than for the money. Therefore, using the salaries of the top grossing actors as representative of the industry may be flawed. How would you decide what the typical actor makes?

Lesson Outcomes

At the end of this lesson you will be able to

• identify the outliers in a set of data
• explain the effects of outliers on mean, median, and mode
• calculate the trimmed mean for a set of data and justify the removal of the outliers

Lesson Questions

You will investigate the following questions:

• Why might outlying values exist in a data set, and when should they be removed?
• How do outlying values impact the central tendency of a data set?
• How can data that contains outlying values be interpreted?

Assessment

Your assessment may be based on a combination of the following tasks:

• completion of the Lesson 2 Assignment (Download the Lesson 2 Assignment and save it in your course folder now.)
• course folder submissions from Try This and Share activities
• additions to Glossary Terms
• work under Project Connection

Materials and Equipment

You will need

• calculator