Important: The stats package has been deprecated. Use the superseding package Statistics instead.

The function range of the subpackage stats[describe, ...] finds the minimum and the maximum value of the observations in data.

The boundaries of the classes are used for grouped data. Missing data are ignored.

The range is a measure of dispersion of the data. For more information about such measures, refer to the standard deviation.

The range is useful in finding appropriate boundaries for tallying data (see transform[tallyinto] - note that the upper boundary of classes are exclusive for tallyinto), and for histograms (see statplots[histogram]). One disadvantage of using the range as a dispersion measure is that it is strongly dependent on the extreme values in the data.

The data must be numeric.

The command with(stats[describe],range) allows the use of the abbreviated form of this command.

$\mathrm{with}\left(\mathrm{stats}\right)\:$

$\mathrm{describe}\left[\mathrm{range}\right]\left(\left[5\,6\,1\,9\right]\right)$

$1..9$

$\mathrm{describe}\left[\mathrm{range}\right]\left(\left[\mathrm{Weight}\left(1..2\,6\right)\,\mathrm{Weight}\left(3..7\,8\right)\right]\right)$

$1..7$