When should one of mean, mode, and median be used over the other
In: 15
mean is the most intuitive, and you can usually use it if you know the data to be normally distributed. things like adult height, weight, etc.
if the data is highly skewed, you want to use the median. like say if you want to know the average salary in a group of people but one of them is an NBA player, that one guy’s humongous salary will have a huge influence on the average. so you want to look at the value in the middle when lined up in order, that is a better indicator of “average” value.
mode is more for when you dont really care about the average but more want to know the most common values. Typically for things with pretty low values. A good example is number of cars owned by a household. What’s more useful, knowing the average number of cars is 2.47, or knowing the most common number of cars in a family is 2?
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