Inspired by a question about standard dev, this one is a question that has been bugging me for years. I’ve been using the mean and stdev a lot in my work and during my college years, but I never really used median and mode outside when it was introduced. I’ve seen no use for it so far. So, ELI5? especially to those people who use this frequently.
In: Mathematics
In the zoo i work at we have started shifting to use a median life expectancy instead of average.
Let’s say you had animals that lived 28, 29, 30, 31, and 50 the average age would be 33.6, but the median age would be 30. The animal that lived to 50 would be an outlier that could bring that average age up more than using a median (which would be the middle where 50% of animals die before that age and 50% die after that age. It’s a little more representation using a median than average. This small subset of ages would be skewed by using the average when only one animal actually got past that averaged age
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