Instructions *** You will reply to 2 classmates’ threads. At least 1 paragraph in length. They must be on the same page but LABELED WHOSE is WHOSE. The first paragraph should be labeled (Jacob Gross) and the other one should be labeled (Chelsey Ford) ******When responding posts, evaluate the effects of their chosen outliers.
Jacob Gross
The example of a statistical outlier in real life that I chose to discuss is that of movie profits over the past thirty years. Now, granted this is not something that has much of an effect on the world but as an avid movie-goer I was interested in the topic. The trend of box office profits since 1980 has been a rather steady increase each year with some deviation happening past 2004. The average yearly profit over the span 1980-2021 was $9.37 billion in the U.S. and Canada with the data ranging from $.92 billion to $11.89 billion.
The outlier which should come as no surprise to anyone was the year 2020, where the profits from the previous year had been $11.32 billion shot all the way down to $2.1 billion dollars. When a rough adjustment for inflation is made for the lowest data point of $.92 billion back in 1981 which today would be worth $2.9 billion, 2020 becomes the lowest profit year of the entire data set. This of course is due to the impacts of Covid-19 and if the data were created in a bell curve chart rather than a line graph, seeing this data point as an outlier would be difficult. But since it so drastically opposes the overall trend of an increase in profit, it seemed like a fun outlier to look at.
Chelsey Ford
There are many examples in real life that have outliers in them. The one I chose for this discussion is income and the outliers in it. Income is something that is always changing and fluctuation either lower or higher, especially within the past few years. On example that I found to describe an outlier in income was from an article titled “5 Examples of Outliers in Real Life”. In this article, it is explained how someone’s income could be classifies as an outlier. The example explains that in lower quartile range, income may be $15,000 per year and in the upper quartile range, income may be $120,000 per year so therefore the interquartile range would be $120,000 – $15,000 which would bring us to $105,000 per year for the average (Zach, 2021). This means that any income that goes outside of these ranges would be classified as an outlier. A few examples of income outliers would be Elon Musk, Bill Gates or high earning actors.
These income ranges make a lot of difference in the world. They can be the difference between lower, middle and upper classes. They also matter when it comes to tax brackets and help for living day to day. The more accurate of reporting then the better it can help. It is also important to recognize these outliers so that it does not affect the data in a negative way for the people who do fall in range, especially those who fall into the lower quartile range. I believe that income is the most prevalent example for outliers and being able to identify them.
