Frequency Distribution

Frequency

Frequency is how often something occurs.

Football

Example: Sam played football on:

  • Saturday Morning,
  • Saturday Afternoon
  • Thursday Afternoon

The frequency was 2 on Saturday, 1 on Thursday and 3 for the whole week.

Frequency Distribution

By counting frequencies we can make a Frequency Distribution table.

Example: Goals

Sam's team has scored the following numbers of goals in recent games

2, 3, 1, 2, 1, 3, 2, 3, 4, 5, 4, 2, 2, 3

Sam put the numbers in order, then added up:

frequency distribution

  • how often 1 occurs (2 times),
  • how often 2 occurs (5 times),
  • etc,

and wrote them down as a Frequency Distribution table.

From the table we can see interesting things such as

  • getting 2 goals happens most often
  • only once did they get 5 goals

This is the definition:

Frequency Distribution: values and their frequency (how often each value occurs).

Here is another example:

Example: Newspapers

These are the numbers of newspapers sold at a local shop over the last 10 days:

22, 20, 18, 23, 20, 25, 22, 20, 18, 20

Let us count how many of each number there is:

Papers Sold Frequency
18 2
19 0
20 4
21 0
22 2
23 1
24 0
25 1

It is also possible to group the values. Here they are grouped in 5s:

Papers Sold Frequency
15-19 2
20-24 7
25-29 1

(Learn more about Grouped Frequency Distributions)

Graphs

After creating a Frequency Distribution table you might like to make a Bar Graph or a Pie Chart using the Data Graphs (Bar, Line and Pie) page.

 

1442, 1443, 1444, 1882, 1883, 1884, 1885, 3781, 3782, 3783