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 problem with the mean is that it can be strongly affected by extremely large values or small values.
Lets take a small town with 10 people, but one is a billionaire. Yearly salaries are 9 people at 50,000 and 1 at 1,000,000,000.
If we take the mean, then the average salary in town is over 100 million a year (100,045,000)
But if you take the median, it’s $50,000
If we take a less ridiculous example, In the USA, mean salary is $60,575 while median salary is $56,420.
This gives a more accurate idea of how much people are making, ignoring the few rich people that are pulling the mean way up.
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