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Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Exploratory Analysis

Skewed

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

/skjuːd/adjectiveCommon term

In data science & analytics, skewed means: Describes a distribution that is not symmetrical and has a long tail of values on one side, such as income data where a few people earn far more than most.

In Turkish: çarpık, asimetrik, yanlı

How it is used

Data is 'right-skewed' when the long tail is on the high side and 'left-skewed' when it is on the low side. In right-skewed data the mean is usually above the median. Also used loosely to mean biased: 'the results are skewed'.

Example sentences

  1. Revenue per customer is heavily skewed, so the median is more useful than the mean.

  2. The survey results are skewed because only our most loyal users replied.

Common collocations

  • right-skewed
  • heavily skewed
  • skewed distribution
  • skewed results
  • distributionThe way the values of a variable are spread out, showing which values are common, which are rare and how far apart they are; often viewed as a histogram.
  • medianThe middle value when all the numbers in a group are sorted from smallest to largest; half the values are below it and half are above it.
  • meanThe value you get by adding all the numbers in a group and dividing the total by how many numbers there are; the usual meaning of 'average'.
  • outlierA value that is very far from most of the other values in a dataset, for example one order of 50,000 dollars among orders of around 40 dollars.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Exploratory Analysis

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