How To Calculate Percent Error
When you have an estimate and want to compare it with an actual outcome, it's sometimes useful to know by what percentage you were wrong. VideoJug has the perfect video for teaching you how to calculate percentage error.
In this video, I'm going to show you how to calculate percentage error. So, the first we want to calculate percentage error is we calculate the error first. Now, an error comes when you're estimating something, so let's say you took an estimate.
Let's say you're estimating my height. I know my actual height is 180 centimeters, but let's say you estimated I was 185 centimeters. So, first thing is we calculate the error.
That is your estimate, and you take away the actual. Okay, so the first thing when calculating percent error is you calculate the error, so from your estimate, you need to take away the actual height and let's say you estimated I was 185 centimeters, but actually I'm 180. So, that means that your error is 5.
Okay, so we've got our error. Now, how do we turn that into percentage error? So, what you do is you take this, percentage error is your error divided by actual, and you multiply by one hundred to put it into percentage, otherwise it's just a fraction. My actual height is 180, but you estimated I was 185, so your error was 5.
Okay, so percentage error is my error, which is 5, divided by my actual height, which is 180, and you multiply that by 100. And that will give you 2.78%.
Always remember to multiply by 100 to put it into percentage error, so this is 2.78%. And that is how to calculate percentage error. .