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Statistics vocabulary · Descriptive Statistics

Frequency

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/ˈfriːkwənsi/nounCore term

In statistics, frequency means: The number of times a value or category occurs in a data set; a relative frequency gives the same information as a proportion or percentage.

In Turkish: frekans, sıklık

How it is used

Frequencies are the first thing analysts look at for categorical variables, usually in a frequency table with counts and percentages. A cumulative frequency adds up the counts up to each value. In SPSS, 'Frequencies' is the menu item that produces these tables.

Example sentences

  1. The frequency table shows that 62% of respondents chose 'agree'.

  2. Run frequencies on every variable first to catch coding errors.

Common collocations

  • frequency table
  • relative frequency
  • cumulative frequency
  • frequency distribution
  • run frequencies
  • distributionThe pattern showing which values a variable takes and how often each one occurs, often pictured as a histogram or a curve.
  • histogramA chart of touching bars showing how many observations of a numeric variable fall into each interval, called a bin.
  • percentileA value below which a given percentage of the observations fall; for example, 90% of the data lie below the 90th percentile.
  • cross-tabulationA table that shows how the categories of two or more categorical variables combine, with the number of cases in each combination.
  • modeThe value that appears most often in a data set. A distribution can have one mode, two (bimodal) or several.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

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