When should one of mean, mode, and median be used over the other
In: 15
It depends on how much you want to know about the distribution. Let’s say you’re shopping for break pads. There are a bunch of different brands available.
You dont know anything about break pads, you just ask the guy what kind people usually get. That’s the mode.
Or maybe you don’t want to trust the crowd, they probably just picked the cheap low quality one thats going to wear out faster, but you dont want the overpriced name brand one either, you just want the middle of the road breakpad, that’s the median.
In this case the mean doesn’t make much sense, you can calculate it, but then you get a number that doesn’t correlate with an actual break pad, so you pick the breakpad close to that calculated median.
Sometimes the mean is a lot higher or a lot lower than the median, that would happen if you accidentally include some professional race car breakpad in your calculation. A nice thing about median and mode is they sort out the outliers. There are better ways to measure the distribution, but if you’re looking for simple figures, the mean captures the distribution a little bit.
Latest Answers