Definition of frequency distribution Frequency distribution
fre•quen•cy dis•tri•bu•tion
We found 2 definitions of frequency distribution from 2 different sources.
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What does frequency distribution mean?
WordNet
Noun |
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| frequency distribution - a distribution of observed frequencies of occurrence of the values of a variable | ||
| statistical distribution, distribution the act of distributing or spreading or apportioning | ||
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Wikipedia 
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This simple table has two drawbacks. When a variable can take continuous values instead of discrete values or when the number of possible values is too large, the table construction is difficult, if it is not impossible. A slightly different scheme based on the range of values is used in such cases. For example, if we consider the heights of the students in a class, the frequency table might look like below.
Applications.
Managing and operating on frequency tabulated data is much simpler than operation on raw data. There are simple algorithms to calculate median, mean (statistics), standard deviation etc. from these tables.
Statistical hypothesis testing is based on the assessment of differences and similarities between frequency distributions. This assessment involves measures of central tendency or averages, such as the mean and median, and measures of variability or statistical dispersion, such as the standard deviation or variance.
A frequency distribution is said to be skewed when its mean and median are different. The kurtosis of a frequency distribution is the concentration of scores at the mean, or how peaked the distribution appears if depicted graphically—for example, in a histogram. If the distribution is more peaked than the normal distribution it is said to be leptokurtic; if less peaked it is said to be platykurtic.
Frequency distributions are also used in frequency analysis to crack codes and refer to the relative frequency of letters in different languages.
