When should one of mean, mode, and median be used over the other
In: 15
Mean is all the values added together divided by the total number of values.
Median is the halfway value, half the sample has higher values, half the sample has lower ones.
Mode is the most common value.
Mean is best used when there aren’t excessive outlier values, and/or those values occur somewhat equally on each side, and close to something called the “normal distribution”. Mean is useful as there are a lot of statistical analysis that can be readily done on a data distribution if you know the mean and some other components of the data distribution.
Median is good for when you have major outliers on one side that seriously skew the results in a way that distorts the mean to an extent it’s usefulness is degraded. Income is a good example of this when you have a serious skew of income towards the upper end. A handful of people earning tens/hundreds of millions of dollars a year drags the Mean up quite a bit, but that tiny portion of the populations income is mostly irrelevant for understanding what’s happening to the population as a whole.
Mode is a bit of an odd one and is best used when there’s either discontinuous data or the data inherently doesn’t average/can’t be rationally ordered. For example: “what is the average car color”.
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