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Prices, location and spread
The free course, Prices, location and spread, explores aspects of the question Are people getting better or worse off? It covers statistical measures characterising the location of a batch of data (the median and the mean), and looks further at weighted means and at the interquartile range as a measure of spread (variability). Boxplots and stemplots are used to picture the data. All this is done in the context of measuring prices, and the course also covers the concept of a price index, and the index numbers (Retail Prices Index and Consumer Prices Index) used to measure price levels and inflation in the UK.
Course learning outcomes
After studying this course, you should be able to:
- find the mean and median of a batch of data
- find the weighted mean of two or more numbers
- find the lower and upper quartiles, interquartile range and five-figure summary of a batch of data
- calculate a simple chained price index
- use the Retail Prices Index and the Consumer Prices Index to measure price changes.
First Published: 21/05/2015
Updated: 20/06/2019
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