# Distribution of numbers affected by “round” numbers (ending in 0 or 5)

I have a large data set that I'd like to perform statistical analysis on, and I'm in the beginning stages of this process. This data set comes from a large sample of user inputs of integer values from 1-30(ish). I'd like to compute some basic statistics like mean and standard deviation, but I have an issue with the data. Because it comes from human input, people frequently select "round" numbers, such as 15 or 20, drastically skewing any results. Is there an elegant way to handle this problem? I'd imagine that I could perform some sort of averaging or smoothing on a histogram to approximate this, but that seems messy. I don't know of any process that handles something like this, but certainly someone has faced the problem before.

Thanks!

• You could maximize a likelihood based on interval data, that is, assuming a datum 15 really means some interval, like$[12.5, 17.5]$. – kjetil b halvorsen Mar 9 '15 at 16:44
• Census bureaus deal with this all the time, because people tend to round their ages to a multiple of 5: consult their documentation. What you do about it, though, depends on what kind of analysis you plan. Note that you are not describing anything specific to Normal distributions--mean and SD are merely descriptive statistics--and that "continuous integer values" is a contradiction in terms: integral values are the opposite of continuous. Indeed, the relatively small range suggests caution in using a continuous model (such as a Normal distribution) for any analysis. – whuber Mar 9 '15 at 18:16
• @whuber: good call on the census bureau, I'll look into that. I edited the post to remove the continuous part, I was a little unsure of that when writing it and you're correct. It's a fairly small range but the physical effect of the value is pretty varied, and I have several thousand data points which I hope lends enough power to make valid inferences. – french13 Mar 9 '15 at 18:34