Wouldnt mean salary be a better representation of the public then median?
In: Other
No one statistic is good for everything. As others have mentioned mean can be swayed by outliers, so median is a good snapshot of the middle of the pack score.
Mode (the most common data point) is a bit of a meme, but it’s good to check if a data set is “bimodal” (or multimodal). For example, a test could have a bunch of students that got an A, and a bunch that got a D, and a couple with Bs and Cs. The median and mode would both say the average is a B or a C, but most people didn’t get that mark.
Another thing that is good to look at is the interquartile range (25th percentile – 75th percentile). It’s a pretty robust way to see what most people have.
Finally, standard deviation (the average amount to which each data point varies from the mean) is also good to be aware of. This shows how much the average individual data point does or does not ressemble the mean.
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