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Measures of Central Tendency - Definition, Equations & Examples

The document discusses measures of central tendency, which are ways to characterize typical values in a data set. There are three main measures: mean, median, and mode. The mean is the average value calculated by adding all values and dividing by the total number of data points. The median is the middle value when data is arranged from lowest to highest. The mode is the most frequently occurring value. Which measure is best depends on how the data is distributed and whether outliers are present.

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Emma Santos Amooti
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21 views4 pages

Measures of Central Tendency - Definition, Equations & Examples

The document discusses measures of central tendency, which are ways to characterize typical values in a data set. There are three main measures: mean, median, and mode. The mean is the average value calculated by adding all values and dividing by the total number of data points. The median is the middle value when data is arranged from lowest to highest. The mode is the most frequently occurring value. Which measure is best depends on how the data is distributed and whether outliers are present.

Uploaded by

Emma Santos Amooti
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Measures of Central Tendency: Definition, Equations & Examples

How can you tell what is the average or typical value in a data set? The measures of central tendency can help
you to figure this out! In this lesson, learn about these common ways to characterize data.

What are the Measures of Central Tendency?


Sarah made an 85 on her last math test, and she wondered how her grade compared to the other
students in her class. The grades of all eleven students in the class were listed in a table, so Sarah
decided to take this data and do some quick calculations.

Test score data from the math class


She wanted to know how well the average student in her class did on the exam. After doing some
Study.com
research, she Study.com
concluded that the best way to do that would be to calculate one or moreINSTALL
of the
measures of central
FREE – ontendency
Google Play for the test score data.

There are three common measures of central tendency: mean, median, and mode. Although each
of these tries to give an average or representative value for the entire data set, they do so in
different ways and, therefore, can be used to analyze different types of data.

Definitions and Equations


The mean is the arithmetic average of all the values in the data set. This is the most common
measure of central tendency, but it has some disadvantages. If the data is significantly skewed or
there are some outliers, the mean may not accurately reflect the true middle of the distribution.

To calculate the mean of a group of numerical values, add all the values together and then divide
by the total number of values (n)

The median is the value that is in the middle of the data set when all the values are arranged from
smallest to largest. Median is a better measure of central tendency in situations where the mean
might be skewed. This usually occurs if the data is not normally distributed or if there are outliers.
Outliers will have a much bigger effect on the mean than the median.

Finally, the mode is the most commonly occurring value. One advantage of the mode is that it can
be used with qualitative data and not just numerical data. Both median and mode can only be
calculated for numerical data.

Example - Mean
Let's look at Sarah's math test scores again and try to calculate the mean, median, and mode for
this data.

To find the mean, add up all the test scores and divide by the total number of scores in the list (11
for Sarah's class).
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Example - Median
To find the median score on the test, put all the scores in order from smallest to largest. The one
right in the middle is the median.

So, the mean of this data is 68.6 and the median is 80. If the data was normally distributed without
outliers, you would expect these to be very similar, but in this case, they aren't! Which one would
give Sarah a better representation of the true middle of the data?

Looking at the data again, notice that there are two students who had a score of zero. Maybe those
students were absent on the day of the test or didn't take the test for some other reason. The rest
of the scores fall between 65-100, so these two zeros are definitely outliers to the rest of the data.
When there are outliers like this, the median will give you a better estimate of the true middle value
of the data than the mean.

Example - Mode
The mode of this data is the number that occurs most frequently. In this case, the mode is 95
because it is the only score that occurs more than once in the data. For Sarah's test score data,
mode may not be the best way to measure central tendency.

However, there are definitely situations in which mode is really helpful. For example, suppose
Sarah wanted to plan an ice cream party for her class after the math test. She only wants to buy
one kind of ice cream, so she asked everyone in the class which flavor they prefer. 6 people said
chocolate, 3 said vanilla, and 2 said strawberry.
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It's not possible INSTALLthe
to calculate the mean or median of data like this, but it IS possible to calculate
FREE – on Google Play
mode even when the data is not numerical. In this situation, chocolate ice cream is the mode
because it was the most frequently selected option. Sarah now knows that it would be a good idea
to buy chocolate ice cream because more of the students in her class prefer that flavor.

Lesson Summary
The three measures of central tendency are mean, median, and mode. The mean is the arithmetic
average of all the data in the data set. The median is the value that occurs in the middle when the
data is arranged from smallest to largest. The mode is the value that occurs most commonly.

Mode can be used when you have numerical and qualitative data, but median and mean can only
be used if the data is numerical. Mean is the most common measure of central tendency and
should be used when the data is normally distributed. However, in cases where the data is skewed
or there are outliers, median is usually a better measure of central tendency than mean.
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