TMG-L Archives

Archiver > TMG > 2005-08 > 1122921615


From: "David G. Ball" <>
Subject: RE: [TMG] Statistical Report
Date: Mon, 01 Aug 2005 11:40:15 -0700
In-Reply-To: <351F89D30B94074CA4EF76696E56411301A250DC@susday234.corp.ncr.com>


Kevin wrote:

> Here is an example line from this report:
>
> Age at first marriage
> POP - 14,222
> AVG - 24.3
> STD DEV - 32.4
> MIN - (-1707)
> MAX - 1733
> ID MIN - 22080
> ID MAX - 46047
>
> Can someone help explain what all these mean please?
>

POP: is the number of people in your project (or in the filter set for the
report) that have a birth date and at least one marriage date.

AVG: average age for first marriage for those people in the POP; in your
case a bit over 24 years old.

STD DEV: standard deviation; think of a bar chart by year of age; typically
this is a "bell curve" (a few marry first very young, a few very old and the
rest lumped over a range of years between, say, 17 and 35); one standard
deviation is a calculation that measures how closely bunched or widely
scattered those bars might be. Rough rule of thumb is that one standard
deviation either side of the "mean" (the middle value in the population)
covers about 2/3 of the population. Your number suggests a widely spread
range of first marriage years or, as we'll see below, some data problems.

MIN and ID MIN: the earliest age at which someone in the POP was first
married. You have a problem in that someone was married 1,707 years before
they were born. The good news is that in your project you have a person
with TMG ID# 22080 that is the one with a date problem either in their birth
date or their first marriage date.

MAX and ID MAX: the oldest age at which someone in the POP was first
married. Again, you have a person married at age 1733 and that person is
your project ID# 46047 that you might want to check out.

You might want to run an AUDIT report to see if there are other potential
abnormal date issues that you want to consider. Browse through the criteria
settings first to set them to catch only obvious errors, since with a file
the size of yours you will get a fair number of legitimate people with, say,
more than 10 kids or married before age 16.

Dave Ball


This thread: