>Which is why knowing the distribution....
As not everything has a Gaussian (normal; bell) distribution. Much of what is
taught in the typical statistics course for non-mathematicians focusses on
normal distributions and their variants because they nicely represent so much
of real life populations of measurements.
W/R/T median and average, there is no "right" one. It all depends on the
nature of what it is you're measuring and what you want to know. The median is
useful for a lot of sociological data as the question often asked is "what is
typical for a single data point". For populations that are additive in nature
(say, rainfall amounts), the average is probably more useful if for no other
reason than you can multiply it by the number of samples and get the total for
the dataset.
Al
AB2ZY
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