In statistics, a frequency chart displays the given data, in which the frequency of each data item is found. What does frequency mean? Frequency as we use in case of the frequency of the flight from one place to another means the number of times the particular flight travels from one place to another. In statistics, frequency is used to display the number of times the data item occurs in a data set. Tally marks or tallies are used to record and show the frequency of an item in a data. Now, let us learn about cumulative frequency. It is the total of the frequency and all the frequencies below it in a frequency distribution. In simple words, it is the running total of frequencies. Given frequency of a set of data, the Ogive chart looks something similar to the chart given below:
Age Frequency cumulative frequency
8 4 4
9 6 4+6 =10
10 15 10+15=25
11 9 25+9=34
12 18 34+18 = 52
13 10 52+10 =62
The Ogive Definition can be given as a distribution curve in which the frequencies are cumulative
Now that we have the cumulative frequencies, we shall now plot the graph. To plot the graph we take the ages on the x-axis and the cumulative frequencies on the y-axis as we plot a normal line graph. Once all the points are plotted, we now join the points. The curve we get is the cumulative frequency curve, also called the Ogive
We can define Ogive as a cumulative frequency graph which is a curve or graph showing the cumulative frequency for a given set of data. When the given data is an un-grouped data, to get Ogive, we find the cumulative frequency of the data and plot that on the y-axis and the given data to which cumulative frequency is calculated is taken on the x-axis. The graph we get is the Ogive of ungrouped data. When the data given is a grouped data, we divide the group into classes with upper and lower boundary which is taken on the x-axis and the cumulative frequency of the data on the y-axis. The graph we get here is the Ogive of a grouped data.
Ogive Example
For example, let us assume the amount of savings for the months of January and March as $200 and the savings of $125 for the months February, April and May. For the given data, the ogive displays a running total of the savings with the amount saved in dollars on the y-axis and the months on the x-axis.
