Analyzing the interquartile range (IQR) of a dataset

The IQR also measures the spread or variability of a dataset. It is simply the distance between the first and third quartiles. The IQR is a very useful statistic, especially when we need to identify where the middle 50% of values in a dataset lie. Unlike the range, which can be skewed by very high or low numbers (outliers), the IQR isn’t affected by outliers since it focuses on the middle 50. It is also useful when we need to compute for outliers in a dataset.

To analyze the IQR of a dataset, we will use the IQR method from the stats module within the scipy library in Python.

Getting ready

We will work with the COVID-19 cases again for this recipe.

How to do it…

We will explore how to compute the IQR using the scipy library:

1. Import pandas and import the stats module from the scipy library:

   import pandas as pd
   from scipy import stats

2. Load the .csv into a dataframe using read_csv. Then subset...