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The Open University

Prices, location and spread

The Open University via OpenLearn

Overview

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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.

Syllabus

  • Introduction
  • Learning outcomes
  • 1 Measuring location
  • 1 Measuring location
  • 1.1 Data on prices
  • 1.2 The median
  • 1.3 The arithmetic mean
  • 1.4 The mean and median compared
  • Exercises on Section 1
  • 2 Weighted means
  • 2 Weighted means
  • 2.1 The mean of a combined batch
  • 2.2 Further uses of weighted means
  • 2.3 More than two numbers
  • Exercises on Section 2
  • 3 Measuring spread
  • 3 Measuring spread
  • 3.1 The range
  • 3.2 Quartiles and the interquartile range
  • A measure of spread
  • 3.3 The five-figure summary and boxplots
  • Exercises on Section 3
  • 4 A simple chained price index
  • 4 A simple chained price index
  • 4.1 A two-commodity price index
  • Exercise on Section 4
  • 5 The UK government price indices
  • 5 The UK government price indices
  • 5.1 What are the CPI and RPI?
  • 5.2 Calculating the price indices
  • 5.3 Using the price indices
  • Exercises on Section 5
  • Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements

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