There is some argument that MAD is actually better than RMS for a lot of applications. Apparently it predated RMS, but one of the reasons it was switched to was

There is some argument that MAD is actually better than RMS for a lot of applications. Apparently it predated RMS, but one of the reasons it was switched to was because RMS minimizing linear regression is much, much simpler to calculate. Also consider comparing the robustness of RMS based regression with MAD based regression. See: http://matlabdatamining.blogspot.com/2007/10/l-1-linear-regression.html http://matlabdatamining.blogspot.com/2007/10/l-1-linear-regr...