ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Dispersion (statistics)

Okay kiddo, let me tell you about dispersion in statistics. Imagine you have a bag of candies. Now, if you want to know how different the candies are from each other, you need to look at their dispersion.

For example, if all the candies in the bag are the same kind and same color, then there is no dispersion, because they are all the same. But if you have different kinds of candies in the bag, with different colors, shapes and flavors, then there is a lot of dispersion among the candies.

Similarly, in statistics, dispersion refers to how spread out the data is from the center. To see the dispersion of a group of numbers, you can calculate the range, variance or standard deviation.

Range is the difference between the largest and smallest numbers in a set of data. For example, if you have these numbers: 3, 5, 7, 9 and 11, the range is 11 - 3 = 8.

Variance is a measure of how different all the numbers are from each other, it is calculated by adding up the squares of the difference between each number and the mean (average) of the group, then dividing it by the number of observations.

Standard deviation is the square root of variance. It tells you how much the data deviates from the average. The more spread out the data, the higher the standard deviation.

So, in summary, dispersion in statistics refers to how spread out the data is from its central value, and there are different ways to measure it, such as range, variance, and standard deviation.