Range
Author: Ernad Mujakic
Date: 2025-07-15
The range is a Measure of Dispersion that represents the difference between the smallest and largest value in a dataset. The range is calculated as:
Advantages
- Easy to compute: Very easy value to calculate even by hand.
- Intuitive: Illustrates the spread of the data by a simple value that is in the same scale as the underlying dataset making it easy to understand.
Disadvantages
- Sensitive to Outliers: The range, in the worst case, can be entirely determined by two outliers that do not accurately represent the underlying dataset, making the range a misleading metric in such a case.
- Vague: Does not provide much information regarding the distribution of a population, making it very uninformative.
Types of Ranges
- Interquartile Range: The IQR of a dataset is the difference between the first quartile
- Midrange: The midrange of a dataset is the mean of the maximum and minimum values. It is calculated as:
References
- J. Han, M. Kamber, and J. Pei, Data Mining : Concepts and Techniques. Burlington, Ma: Elsevier, 2012.
- GeeksforGeeks, “Range in Statistics,” GeeksforGeeks, Oct. 08, 2023. https://www.geeksforgeeks.org/maths/range-in-statistics/