outlier
2 antonyms and opposites of outlier, grouped by meaning.
Noun — A data point that sits far away from the rest of a set of results, and which may signal a real extreme case or a measurement error.
Synonyms by Meaning
1. noun
A data point that sits far away from the rest of a set of results, and which may signal a real extreme case or a measurement error.
“One household reported an income of £4 million, an outlier that dragged the mean upwards.”
Opposites
Antonyms
How to use outlier
The word patterns that sound natural to a native speaker.
Neutral; standard in statistics and increasingly common in general writing.
Etymology
From out and the verb lie, meaning something lying outside the main body; the geological sense is recorded before the statistical one.
Full origin of outlier →Frequently asked questions
What is the difference between an outlier and an anomaly?
An outlier is defined statistically: it lies far from the rest of the distribution. An anomaly implies something is genuinely wrong or unexplained. Every anomaly may look like an outlier, but many outliers are legitimate extreme values rather than errors.
Should you remove outliers from your data?
Only if you can justify it. Remove a point when you have evidence it is a recording or measurement error. Removing points simply because they are inconvenient biases the result, and in skewed data a median or a robust method is a better answer than deletion.
How are outliers identified?
Common rules are values more than 1.5 times the interquartile range beyond the first or third quartile, or more than about three standard deviations from the mean. Both are conventions, not laws, and the right threshold depends on the data.