Sunday, January 24, 2010

When talking about 'average' why is it more appropriate to the mean, median or mode in specific cases?

If you were a shoe salesman, you would want the mode of shoes sold, so you could sell more shoes. The mean wouldn't help since you don't have a size 7.34582.





For housing prices, median is often used because a gazillion dollar house could really skew the mean. Extreme values are called outliers and can distort the mean so that the mean doesn't look too average. Imagine that 5 houses sold in a town for :100,000, 99,800, 101,300, 89,900 and 6,000,000. Your mean, in this case, would be useless and make the communty look more wealthy than it is.





Mean is good for student scores if you drop their lowest (and I guess highest) scores.When talking about 'average' why is it more appropriate to the mean, median or mode in specific cases?
The mean because it is the most accurate way to calulate the average of something.
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