frequency distribution

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In statistics, a frequency distribution is a tabulation of the values that one or more variables take in a sample.

Univariate frequency tables

Univariate frequency distributions are often presented as lists ordered by quantity showing the number of times each value appears. For example, if 100 people rate a five-point Likert scale assessing their agreement with a statement on a scale on which 1 denotes strong agreement and 5 strong disagreement, the frequency distribution of their responses might look like:

This simple tabulation has two drawbacks. When a variable can take continuous values instead of discrete values or when the number of possible values is too large, the table becomes less meaningful and more difficult to interpret. A different tabulation scheme aggregates values into bins such that each bin encompasses a range of values. For example, the heights of the students in a class could be organized into the following frequency table.

A Frequency Distribution shows us a summarized grouping of data divided into mutually exclusive classes and the number of occurrences in a class. It is a way of showing unorganized data e.g. to show results of an election, income of people for a certain region, sales of a product within a certain period, student loan amounts of graduates, etc. Some of the graphs that can be used with frequency distributions are histograms, line graphs, bar charts and pie charts. Frequency distributions are used for both qualitative and quantitative data.

Joint frequency distributions

Bivariate joint frequency distributions are often presented as two-way tables:

The total row and total column report the marginal frequencies or marginal distribution, while the body of the table reports the joint frequencies.^[1]

Applications

Managing and operating on frequency tabulated data is much simpler than operation on raw data. There are simple algorithms to calculate median, mean, standard deviation etc. from these tables.

Statistical hypothesis testing is founded on the assessment of differences and similarities between frequency distributions. This assessment involves measures of central tendency or averages, such as the mean and median, and measures of variability or statistical dispersion, such as the standard deviation or variance.

A frequency distribution is said to be skewed when its mean and median are different. The kurtosis of a frequency distribution is the concentration of scores at the mean, or how peaked the distribution appears if depicted graphically—for example, in a histogram. If the distribution is more peaked than the normal distribution it is said to be leptokurtic; if less peaked it is said to be platykurtic.

Frequency distributions are also used in frequency analysis to crack codes and refer to the relative frequency of letters in different languages.

Notes

1. ^ Stat Trek, Statistics and Probability Glossary, s.v. Joint frequency

See also

Statistics portal

• Cross tabulation
• Cumulative frequency