I was looking up the average networth of 30 year olds in the United States and it said: “The average net worth is $122,000 and the median net worth is $35,112” my brain is too smooth please help.
In: 8
Maybe a simple example will help. For {1,2,3}, ‘2’ is both the median and average. But the median will stay the same even if the ‘3’ is increased quite a lot. For example {1,2,1000} still has a median of 2, but the average is much higher.
As others have probably pointed out, for the median, half of the values are below and half are higher. This is not always true for the average.
It’s also possible to show that the median is the point ‘x’ which minimizes the total distances from x to values in the set. But the mean minimizes the sum of the squared distances.
The average can be influenced by a few large (or small) values. If you were applying for a sales job, it might be more interesting to know the median salaries of salesmen, since the average could be grossly inflated by even one super-salesman.
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