I know it’s a common saying that statistics isn’t intuitive to humans. I’ve read my Taleb. *Intuitively*, I can see why one might need to find the mean (average) of a data set as well as the mode.
But where and why would someone need to find the Median? I’ve never calculated the median of a data set in daily life. On the other hand, I compute the mean of several values multiple times a week sometimes. I don’t calculate Modes that much, but I can see **why** someone would care about the most-occurring value.
Can someone explain the relevance of finding the Median? I’m sure there are plenty of useful applications and I’m just unaware of them.
Thanks in advance!
In: 4
The median is useful when you want to know a typical value from a group, especially if there are outliers.
Let’s say you are looking at salaries in a group. Say there are 10 people making $25,000, nine people making $50,000, and one person making $10,000,000. The mean salary is $535,000. But that isn’t useful for anything, because no one in the group is making close to that amount, and most are making a lot less.
The median, however, is more helpful. Since there’s an even number of items in the set, it’s halfway between the middle two, which is $37,500. This is pretty close to what all but one person in the group is making.
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