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 would be the middle person. If you lined up 99 people by height…. the 50th person would be taller than 50% and shorter than 50% of the 99 people… and you’d take their height as the average. It’s a good way to represent an average when it doesn’t make sense to just add it all up and divide (like the mean). For example, in income… if you take 100 people and they all earn $10 an hour, but 1 person earns $1000 an hour… $10 is the median but $19.90 is the mean. $10 is clearly more representative here to describe the average person
The mode is another way of doing the above but for “most popular” choices. It’s usually for categories like favourite colour where you can’t rank them. If you take 100 people and 50 of them prefer blue, 30 green, 10 red, 10 yellow… describing it as the average person prefers blue would be using the mode
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