title: Using the range to calculate the coefficient of variation.
abstract: In this research a coefficient of variation (CVhigh-low) is calculated from the highest and lowest values in a set of data. Use of CVhigh-low when the population is normal, leptokurtic, and skewed is discussed. The statistic is the most effective when sampling from the normal distribution. With the leptokurtic distributions, CVhigh-low works well for comparing the relative variability between two or more distributions but does not provide a very "good" point estimate of the population coefficient of variation. With skewed distributions CVhigh-low works well in identifying which data set has the more relative variation but does not specify how much difference there is in the variation. It also does not provide a "good" point estimate.
authors.affiliation: Department of Information Systems/Decision Sciences, College of Business and Public Administration, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529, USA. grhiel@odu.edu
authors.forename: G Steven
authors.initials: GS
authors.lastname: Rhiel
mesh_terms: D003198:Computer Simulation; D003201:Computers; D001330:Electronic Data Processing / Q000706:statistics & numerical data*; D006801:Humans; D016008:Statistical Distributions; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires