Measures of Central Tendency

Three most common measures are:

Mean - arithmetic average

Median - midpoint of the distribution (half the values are larger and half are smaller)

Mode - most common value

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Transcript

Now, the three most common measures of centrality are the mean it's simply the arithmetic average.  The median is the midpoint, where half the values are larger and half the values smaller. Or mode - the most commonly occurring value. And it's very important that we look at the difference between these because quite often we will find that computing the mean it gets pulled way off where we expect because one of the values is very very large or one of the values is very small.  So, when we compute the arithmetic mean, it pulls us in that direction.  That's often why in much of our data we look for the median - because we want to understand where is the point where half the values are bigger, and half the values are smaller.