One of three “seven-figure” or “seven-number” summaries: i.e. ways of describing a distribution of values for a continuous variable by seven numbers. They are all extensions of the five point summary (minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile and maximum)
Details #
Bowley’s values are the minimum, first decile (i.e. 10% percentile), the five points of the lower quartile, median and upper quartile then the last decile (90% percentile) and the maximum.
Bowley sounds to have been quite an important figure in statistics but I’d never heard of him. There’s quite a sweet entry about him in wikipedia.
Try also #
- Distribution and …
- Distribution shape
- Five point summary
- Gaussian (“Normal”) distribution
- Null hypothesis significance testing paradigm (NHST)
- Percentiles
- Quantiles
- Quartiles
- Seven point summaries
- “The” seven point summary
I had never come across it until I came to the five number summary for this glossary, and then to these seven number summaries. I think with the ease with which we can now show good plots of the distributions of continuous scores this really isn’t necessary so I’d be surprised if it has a new vogue. Mind you the rather daft “mean and SD” two number summary continues to be used, even made mandatory but the APA publication rules so summaries in our field aren’t about real statistical issues, they’re about traditions and things elevated to markers of respectability.
Chapters #
Not covered in the OMbook.
Online resources #
You could use one of my shiny apps, the one about ECDF plot with quantiles and CIs for quantiles in the unlikely event that you ever want to get any of these seven point splits of your data with their confidence intervals!
Dates #
First created 3.v.25.
