'There's a huge misconception that if someone sneezes a lot then they must have hay fever,' says Dr Adrian Morris of the Surrey Allergy Clinic. From dogs to dust mites and pollen to latex, it's thought that 40 per cent of us suffer from an allergy.
The mean absolute deviation is the average of the positive distances of each point from the mean. The larger the MAD, the greater variability there is in the data (the data is more spread out). The MAD helps determine whether the set's mean is a useful indicator of the values within the set.
(the average) - the sum of all data values divided by the number of the data values. deviation. - the difference between a data value in a set and the mean of the set. - the mean (average) of all deviations in a set equals zero. absolute value. - the distance (a positive quantity) of any value on a number line from zero. - the sum of the absolute values of deviations on each side of the mean are equal. variability. - refers to how spread out (or clustered together) the values are in a data set. - high variablity means the data is spread out.