In Class IX, you have studied the classification of given data into ungrouped as well as grouped frequency distributions. You have also learnt to represent the data pictorially in the form of various graphs such as bar graphs, histograms (including those of varying widths) and frequency polygons. In fact, you went a step further by studying certain numerical representatives of the ungrouped data, also called measures of central tendency, namely, mean, median and mode. In this chapter, we shall extend the study of these three measures, i.e., mean, median and mode from ungrouped data to that of grouped data. We shall also discuss the concept of cumulative frequency, the cumulative frequency distribution and how to draw cumulative frequency curves, called ogives.
Recall from Class IX, a mode is that value among the observations which occurs most often, that is, the value of the observation having the maximum frequency. Further, we discussed finding the mode of ungrouped data. Here, we shall discuss ways of obtaining a mode of grouped data. It is possible that more than one value may have the same maximum frequency. In such situations, the data is said to be multimodal. Though grouped data can also be multimodal, we shall restrict ourselves to problems having a single mode only.
As you have studied in Class IX, the median is a measure of central tendency which gives the value of the middle-most observation in the data. Recall that for finding the median of ungrouped data, we first arrange the data values of the observations in ascending order.
As we all know, pictures speak better than words. A graphical representation helps us in understanding given data at a glance. In Class IX, we have represented the data through bar graphs, histograms and frequency polygons. Let us now represent a cumulative frequency distribution graphically.
In this chapter, you have studied the following points:
1. The mean for grouped data can be found by :
2. The cumulative frequency of a class is the frequency obtained by adding the frequencies
of all the classes preceding the given class.
3. The median for grouped data is formed by using the formula: