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
Median is a more accurate “average” in many cases because a few outliers can throw off mean. Let’s say you’re looking for a city to live in and want to know average home price in Redditville… one rich guy with a $10m estate for sale could throw off the mean, while median shows the number where half the homes cost more, half the home cost less. Similarly, something like average salary at a company could be thrown off by the CEO or a handful of super highly paid C-level execs vs. the rank and file workers… median shows what at what salary half the company’s workers make more and half make less.
Mode is less commonly useful, but could be used to explain typical family size, ie. mode of 2 kids. Explains the most typical/common vs. saying the typical family has 2.3 kids.
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