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Building a Frequency Table
Building a Frequency Table
In a meeting the other day, the presenter was talking about a range of different failures for the product in question. He talked about each issue, a bit about the failure analysis, yet didn’t reveal which failures occurred more or less often.
She did provide a handout with a listing of the problems in order of the customer return date and listing of the failure name (component or system involved). So, I grabbed a piece of paper to create a frequency table so I could quickly determine which problems occurred more often than others.
A Frequency Table Defintion
A frequency table tabulates the number of times (a count, tally or frequency) a bit of data occurs in a dataset.
These tables work for continuous and discreet data and for a smaller dataset are quickly constructed by hand. (it was a rather boring meeting, too).
Steps to Construct a Frequency Table
- Starting with a dataset, scan the data for the minimum and maximum values if numbers. These become the range over which to tally the values. Else, identify the unique values.
- List the unique data values (or bins of values) suitable for counting the occurrence of those values within the…
