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In statistics, a central tendency (or measure of central tendency) is a central or typical value for a probability distribution. [1] Colloquially, measures of central tendency are often called averages. The term central tendency dates from the late 1920s. [2] The most common measures of central tendency are the arithmetic mean, the median, and ...
a measure of location, or central tendency, such as the arithmetic mean; a measure of statistical dispersion like the standard mean absolute deviation; a measure of the shape of the distribution like skewness or kurtosis; if more than one variable is measured, a measure of statistical dependence such as a correlation coefficient
The arithmetic mean of a set of observed data is equal to the sum of the numerical values of each observation, divided by the total number of observations. Symbolically, for a data set consisting of the values x 1 , … , x n {\displaystyle x_{1},\dots ,x_{n}} , the arithmetic mean is defined by the formula:
Since the numbers of this scale have only a rank meaning, the appropriate measure of central tendency is the median. A percentile or quartile measure is used for measuring dispersion. Correlations are restricted to various rank order methods. Measures of statistical significance are restricted to the non-parametric methods (R. M. Kothari, 2004).
Another method of grouping the data is to use some qualitative characteristics instead of numerical intervals. For example, suppose in the above example, there are three types of students: 1) Below normal, if the response time is 5 to 14 seconds, 2) normal if it is between 15 and 24 seconds, and 3) above normal if it is 25 seconds or more, then the grouped data looks like:
The appropriateness of each measure would depend on the type of data, the shape of the distribution of data and which measure of central tendency are being used. If the data is categorical, then there is no measure of variability to report. For data that is numerical, all three measures are possible. If the distribution of data is symmetrical ...
Average of chords. In ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean – the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list.
The measures of statistical dispersion derived from absolute deviation characterize various measures of central tendency as minimizing dispersion: The median is the measure of central tendency most associated with the absolute deviation. Some location parameters can be compared as follows: