What is the actual use of the median and mode in statistics compared to the average (mean)?
In: Mathematics
Median is a really great measurement, and frankly, should be used for a lot of things that people traditionally use average for.
Median takes the “middle” value of a series. So: 1, 5, 10, 11, 87 The median is the middle number, 10.
Why is this interesting? Median is good because it operates somewhat similar to taking an average, but it generally gets rid of outliers, as above had 87 as one of the values. The average of the above is 22.8. But is that even interesting when all of your values except 1 outlier is way lower than that? Median helps deal with series that have outliers. It also tells you a middle point, for example, what if I add another number? Well, just for theory sake, you can say there’s a 50% chance it’ll be below the median of 10.
Median is good for say how long it takes people to pay bills.
If I said the average time it took to pay a bill is 22.8 days, but look above, thats a meaningless value, nothing took 22.8 days, in fact 4/5 of them took 11 or less. But if you say the median amount is 10 days, you can say, there’s probably about a 50% chance it gets paid in 10 days or less. That 87 out there is probably some special case, so we don’t want to use a method that adjusts for that
Mode is just the most common number in a series. 1, 2, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 ,7
The mode is 2. It appears twice, all other numbers appear once. This is just telling me what valued occurred the most times. There’s lots of uses for this, especially in series with a lot of numbers
Latest Answers