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Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a way of expressing, in a (usually) single number, important information about a random variable or a population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, and it may be very different in highly skewed distributions.
The mean (L 2 center) and midrange (L ∞ center) are unique (when they exist), while the median (L 1 center) and mode (L 0 center) are not in general unique. This can be understood in terms of convexity of the associated functions ( coercive functions ).
A more intuitive characteristic of exponential decay for many people is the time required for the decaying quantity to fall to one half of its initial value. (If N(t) is discrete, then this is the median life-time rather than the mean life-time.) This time is called the half-life, and often denoted by the symbol t 1/2. The half-life can be ...
The mean of a set of observations is the arithmetic average of the values; however, for skewed distributions, the mean is not necessarily the same as the middle value (median), or the most likely value (mode). For example, mean income is typically skewed upwards by a small number of people with very large incomes, so that the majority have an ...
For n = 1 or 2, the midrange and the mean are equal (and coincide with the median), and are most efficient for all distributions. For n = 3, the modified mean is the median, and instead the mean is the most efficient measure of central tendency for values of γ 2 from 2.0 to 6.0 as well as from −0.8 to 2.0.
The median is 2 in this case, as is the mode, and it might be seen as a better indication of the center than the arithmetic mean of 4, which is larger than all but one of the values. However, the widely cited empirical relationship that the mean is shifted "further into the tail" of a distribution than the median is not generally true.
A probability distribution is not uniquely determined by the moments E[X n] = e nμ + 1 / 2 n 2 σ 2 for n ≥ 1. That is, there exist other distributions with the same set of moments. [ 4 ] In fact, there is a whole family of distributions with the same moments as the log-normal distribution.
For the population 1,2,3 both the population absolute deviation about the median and the population absolute deviation about the mean are 2/3. The average of all the sample absolute deviations about the mean of size 3 that can be drawn from the population is 44/81, while the average of all the sample absolute deviations about the median is 4/9.