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 good for excluding the extreme elements. Consider the difference between the mean income of a nation and the median income.
The mean income is enormously skewed by the Gates and Bezos of the world who have extreme wealth. In contrast, the median wealth gives us a far better appreciation of what we really want to know: how much money a ‘normal’ person makes.
Mode is generally only used with discrete sets, so it doesn’t really fit the same sort of problems that mean/median do. An example would be a multiple choice quiz you administer to your class. The right answer is C, but the mode answer is B. This allows you to identify a common misunderstanding about your class.
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