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 mean (or average) tends to be more useful when you are dealing with data that has a normal distribution, meaning there’s like an even spread of data points.
Imagine you had 100 students and 20 got A’s, 20 got B’s, 20 got C’s, 20 got D’s and 20 got F’s. The average will be a pretty good indicator of what the average grade score was.
But if you have a much more skewed data set, like say we’re talking about real estate costs of houses in a city, then the average becomes less important. For instance, say 10 houses out of 100 are worth $100 million but the other 90 houses are worth between $200,000 to $400,000. Well, those $100 million houses are gonna screw up the average cost *a lot*, making you think *all* the houses are super expensive in that city. But if you use the *median* you get a better idea of how the costs are *actually* distributed.
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