relative frequency

American

noun

Statistics.

the ratio of the number of times an event occurs to the number of occasions on which it might occur in the same period.

relative frequency British

noun

1. the ratio of the actual number of favourable events to the total possible number of events; often taken as an estimate of probability
2. the proportion of the range of a random variable taking a given value or lying in a given interval

"Collins English Dictionary — Complete & Unabridged" 2012 Digital Edition © William Collins Sons & Co. Ltd. 1979, 1986 © HarperCollins Publishers 1998, 2000, 2003, 2005, 2006, 2007, 2009, 2012

Example Sentences

Examples are provided to illustrate real-world usage of words in context. Any opinions expressed do not reflect the views of Dictionary.com.

“We deal with violations regarding raptors and birds of prey on a relative frequency but I haven’t seen anything to this level of disregard for the animal in quite a while.”

From Los Angeles Times

"One of the things we did in our paper was look at the relative frequencies of the different kinds of dinosaurs," Fiorillo said.

From Science Daily

People on the East Coast earlier this month experienced something that occurs with relative frequency in the West: ominous orange skies lit up by dense wildfire smoke.

From Scientific American

Despite their relative frequency and unfathomable size, finding a supermassive black hole is no easy task.

From Salon

The classic stylometric technique, begun in the late 1980s, was to tabulate the relative frequency of “function words” — words like “by” and “you” and “from” — and then to compare their numbers across manuscripts.

From New York Times

Definitions and idiom definitions from Dictionary.com Unabridged, based on the Random House Unabridged Dictionary, © Random House, Inc. 2023