On an Island populated by pygmies and NBA stars in equal numbers what
good would an average height be?
On 8/16/2015 3:12 PM, Al Kozakiewicz wrote:
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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