Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Verified for the 2026 exam
Verified for the 2026 exam•Written by the Fiveable Content Team • Last updated August 2025
Definition
Outliers are data points that significantly deviate from the overall pattern or trend of a dataset. They can skew statistical analyses and affect the accuracy of results.
Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD): MAD measures how spread out data points are around the mean value. Outliers can greatly impact MAD.
Box-and-Whisker Plot: This graphical representation displays key statistics such as median, quartiles, and outliers in a dataset.
Data Cleaning: The process of identifying and handling outliers is part of data cleaning, which involves removing or correcting errors or inconsistencies in datasets before analysis.