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What I got out of this was: Everyone knows that the mean and median are different ways of summarizing a distribution, which have different purposes. But did you
by humanistbot 5y ago
What I got out of this was: Everyone knows that the mean and median are different ways of summarizing a distribution, which have different purposes. But did you know there are many different kinds of means too? The one you think of when you use "mean" is the arithmetic mean. But there are weighted means, geometric means, and harmonic means. The straightforward arithmetic mean isn't always the best way of summarizing the center of a distribution, even though it is conceptually the simplest and the way we've always done it.
- thaumasiotes 5y ago> Everyone knows that the mean and median are different ways of summarizing a distribution, which have different purposes. But did you know there are many different kinds of means too? Sure. More than that, the median is one of those different kinds of means. A mean is a statement about the total aggregated value of several data points. It answers the question "if all of these values were the same value, what would that value be?". And obviously, the answer depends on the details of how you aggregate the individual values. If your function takes a set of values and returns a value that is at least the minimum of the set and at most the maximum, it's a mean.