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!
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The median is important for thresholds in distributions often. For example if you pick a random person there is a 50% that they are over/under the median, so the median gives a good idea how common certain value ranges are.
This becomes very appararent in very skewed distributions.
Wealth is a good example, if you ask “can a normal person afford X” it doesn’t help to know the mean because that’s mostly dominated by the billionaires wich are a small sample contributing the most wealth. If you pick a random person they will most likely own less than the mean.
If your distribution is the values of 1 to 98 and then 1,000,000 twice the mode is a million, and the mean is just above 20,000. But picking a random number from that distribution will most likely be close to the median of 50.
There is a more general variant of the median: the percentile gives you a value of how many values are above that ones. So if your IQ is in the 95% percentile it means only 1 in 20 people is more intelligent than you. The median is the value with the 50% percentile
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