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
Both median and average are measures of “centrality,” or some kind of an attempt to find the middle of the data. For things like height, average is useful: people tend to all be about the same height and very tall or very short people are rare.
But for some other things, that’s not the case. If you look at “average number of followers on Twitter,” the number is like 700. But most people don’t have a lot of followers and a few people have millions. That would be like looking for average height but one of your friends is 3 km tall. It wouldn’t tell you anything about the “middle” of the data.
So you can use median to get a better idea and see that the median Twitter user has fewer than 200 followers.
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