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
The median is the middle value of the ordered list of all values. If the number of values is even, it’s the average of the two middle ones. It is often used in big data stuff because it’s more resistant to outliers than the average.
If you pull data from some kind of sensor and it somehow messes up for a brief period and creates values vastly above of the usual range, the average is gonna go up as well. The median will stay the same though because it completely ignores what’s going on at the upper end and only tries to find the middle value.
The mode is the most common value in the list. It mostly appears in statistics stuff because it is the most likely value to appear if you pick one from the list at random.
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