These add to 23 percent. But, as we saw before, the overall increase from 1980 to 1990 is 24.3 percent. For these reasons, some statisticians have proposed alternative measures of relative change or difference. One such proposal has been presented by Leo Tornqvist and his colleagues. The formula is We use the natural logarithm for this calculation.
Most good calculators have it as one of their functions.
For example, the relative difference between black and white homicide rate is That is, the rate for blacks is log 90.67 percent higher for blacks than whites. This is illustrated in the following figure. We can have, for example, a sample of the states, a sample of Delawareans, or a sample of students taking this class. Sample sizes, N. We have briefly discussed samples sizes and will do so in more detail when covering statistical inference. Two major goals of statistics are to estimate population parameters and to test hypotheses about them.