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Statistical outliers can be caused by a number of factors:

Firstly, there is experimental error, mistakes in procedure that lead to a greatly increased or diminished effect, for instance if you were experimenting to determine the effect of different colors of sunlight on plants' growth and forgot to install a color filter in one box one day, that plant would probably be an outlier.

Secondly, statistically random sampling should give a representative sample, but you can get exceptional samples. For instance if you were doing an experiment involving reasoning ability, most people would give results pre-test indicative of the average IQ range of the population you sampled from. If you happened to select a super-genius with an IQ of 180, they would have be a very high outlier.

Thirdly, the X you are measuring may produce highly variable results, leading to more than normal outliers.

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15y ago

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