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.
My favourite example is Steve the spider-lover.
On average, a person eats 3 spiders every night. But that’s just because Steve eats 30 billion spiders every night. He loves them.
Regular people don’t eat spiders. The median is 0 spiders every night.
Consider salary. In a group of 500 people the median income gives you much more information about salaries than the Mean. The mean is strongly influenced by extreme numbers.
Outliers. Those extremely higher or lower numbers than the “average range of numbers”. Gives meaning to the actual numbers. I learned it’s a way company’s can market things easier hiding the glaring problems. Extra large population size you can hide the bad.
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