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    1.07 Z-Scores

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    Aisha Chohan
    The document discusses z-scores and how they can be used to determine if an observation is common or exceptional compared to a distribution. A z-score represents the number of standard deviations an observation is from the mean. It provides an example calculating z-scores for tattoo percentages of two football teams. While most observations fall within 1-3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, other distributions may have more extreme values. Z-scores allow for easy comparison of observations across different distributions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd

    1.07 Z-Scores

    Uploaded by

    Aisha Chohan
    157 views2 pages
    The document discusses z-scores and how they can be used to determine if an observation is common or exceptional compared to a distribution. A z-score represents the number of standard deviations an observation is from the mean. It provides an example calculating z-scores for tattoo percentages of two football teams. While most observations fall within 1-3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, other distributions may have more extreme values. Z-scores allow for easy comparison of observations across different distributions.

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    1.07 Z-scores

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    The document discusses z-scores and how they can be used to determine if an observation is common or exceptional compared to a distribution. A z-score represents the number of standard deviations an observation is from the mean. It provides an example calculating z-scores for tattoo percentages of two football teams. While most observations fall within 1-3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, other distributions may have more extreme values. Z-scores allow for easy comparison of observations across different distributions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    157 views2 pages

    1.07 Z-Scores

    Uploaded by

    Aisha Chohan
    The document discusses z-scores and how they can be used to determine if an observation is common or exceptional compared to a distribution. A z-score represents the number of standard deviations an observation is from the mean. It provides an example calculating z-scores for tattoo percentages of two football teams. While most observations fall within 1-3 standard deviations for a normal distribution, other distributions may have more extreme values. Z-scores allow for easy comparison of observations across different distributions.

    Copyright:

    © All Rights Reserved
    Download as PDF, TXT or read online from Scribd
    Download as pdf or txt
    of 2

    1 EXPLORING DATA

    1.07 Z-scores
    What you see here is the so-called tattoo density of football players, expressed in the percentage
    of the body covered with tattoos. The dot plots and the standard deviations show that there is much
    more variability in the distribution of Team 2 than in the distribution of Team 1.
    Sometimes, researchers ask the question if a specific observation is common or exceptional. To
    answer that question, they express a score in terms of the number of standard deviations it is
    removed from the mean. This number is what we call a z-score. In this video Ill explain how you can
    compute z-scores and Ill tell you why they can be useful.
    Lets first take a look at the distribution of Team 1. The mean is 15 and the standard deviation is 2.5.
    To compute z-scores we use this formula. It is not very complicated. It tells you to compute for the
    value youre interested in the difference between that value and the mean, and to divide the
    outcome by the standard deviation. Lets see what that means for a tattoo density of 10.8 percent.
    The z-score of that value is 10.8 minus 15 divided by 2.5. That equals -1.68. So, the z-score is -1.68.
    You can do that for all the values in your distribution. If you do that here, these are the results.
    Notice that you end up with negative z-scores and positive z-scores. Negative z-scores represent
    values below the mean. And positive z-scores represent values above the mean. Because the mean is
    the balance point of your distribution, the negative and positive z-scores cancel each other out. In
    other words, if you add up all z-scores you will get a value of 0.
    Okay, thats nice, but how do you know if a certain z-score is low or high? Well, that depends on
    your distribution and on context. A good rule is that IF the histogram of your variable is bell-shaped,
    68 percent of the observations fall between z-scores of minus 1 and 1; 95 percent between z-scores
    of minus 2 and 2; and 99 percent between z-scores of minus 3 and 3.
    This means that for this type of distribution, a z-score of more than 3 or less than minus 3 can be
    conceived of as rather exceptional. However, if a distribution is strongly skewed to the right, as in
    this graph, large positive z-scores are more common, because there are more extreme values on the
    right side of the distribution. Similarly, if a distribution is strongly skewed to the left, large negative
    z-scores are more common, because there are more extreme values on the left side of the
    distribution. A rule that applies to any distribution, regardless shape, is that 75 percent of the data
    must lie within a z-score of plus or minus 2 and 89 percent within a z-score of plus or minus 3.
    So, in itself a z-score gives you, to a certain extent, information about how extreme an observation
    is. Z-scores are even more useful if you want to compare different distributions. Lets, for example,
    look at the question whether a body weight of 19.3 is common or not. Well, in Team 1 it is not that
    common. The z-score is 19.3 minus 15 divided by 2.5. That equals 1.72. In Team 2 the value of 19.3
    corresponds with a z-score of 19.3 minus 15 divided by 8 equals 0.54. This indicates that in Team 2
    the value of 19.3 is much more common than in Team 1. In Team 2 it is only 0.54 standard deviations
    removed from the mean. In Team 1 it is 1.72 standard deviations removed from the mean.
    If we recode original scores into z-scores, we say that we standardize a variable. Standardization
    means that we replace the scores measured in the original metric by scores expressed in standard
    deviations from the mean. The advantage is that we can see at a glance whether a specific score is
    relatively common or exceptional.

    So, is a football player covering about one-fifth of his body with tattoos exceptional or not? Well,
    that depends on his football team or whichever other group you want to compare him with!

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