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In some circumstances, mathematicians may calculate a mean of an infinite (or even an uncountable) set of values. This can happen when calculating the mean value of a function (). Intuitively, a mean of a function can be thought of as calculating the area under a section of a curve, and then dividing by the length of that section.
The point () is called the mean value of () on [,]. So we write f ¯ = f ( c ) {\displaystyle {\bar {f}}=f(c)} and rearrange the preceding equation to get the above definition. In several variables, the mean over a relatively compact domain U in a Euclidean space is defined by
The arithmetic mean can be similarly defined for vectors in multiple dimensions, not only scalar values; this is often referred to as a centroid. More generally, because the arithmetic mean is a convex combination (meaning its coefficients sum to ), it can be defined on a convex space, not only a vector space.
A simple way to calculate the mean of a series of angles (in the interval [0°, 360°)) is to calculate the mean of the cosines and sines of each angle, and obtain the angle by calculating the inverse tangent. Consider the following three angles as an example: 10, 20, and 30 degrees.
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.
Informally, the expected value is the mean of the possible values a random variable can take, weighted by the probability of those outcomes. Since it is obtained through arithmetic, the expected value sometimes may not even be included in the sample data set; it is not the value you would expect to get in reality.
The geometric mean is more appropriate than the arithmetic mean for describing proportional growth, both exponential growth (constant proportional growth) and varying growth; in business the geometric mean of growth rates is known as the compound annual growth rate (CAGR). The geometric mean of growth over periods yields the equivalent constant ...
Smoothing of a noisy sine (blue curve) with a moving average (red curve). In statistics, a moving average (rolling average or running average or moving mean [1] or rolling mean) is a calculation to analyze data points by creating a series of averages of different selections of the full data set.