Original subtitles

In the earlier lessons, you learned about measures of

central tendency and measures of spread.

As a business analyst,

you should make sure to apply these statistical tools as

you generate and examine the data using business metrics.

A business metric is one data point that in

itself does not tell much about the larger context.

Much like other things in life,

data makes more sense and has more value if it is looked at within a context.

So, as a business analyst,

your data analysis process should include

exploratory checks to examine the spread of the data.

You should always be asking and checking to see if the data is spread out equally in

each direction and to see if the shape of

the distribution resembles a normal distribution or not.

This is important, because you need to know if

what you're seeing is expected or out of the ordinary.

In the previous lesson,

we talked about skewness and we come back to it in this lesson.

The box plot or histogram as you may

remember are useful tools that tell you about skewness.

They can alert you to any skewness in the data.

Another way to check for skewness is to compare the mean

and median values to see if they are more or less the same.

Creating visualizations to look at data distributions and computing

multiple summary statistics like mean and

median should be a reflexive habit of a business analyst.

Let's look at an example to understand why this is important.