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Calculating the median in data sets of odd (above) and even (below) observations. The median of a set of numbers is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a data sample, a population, or a probability distribution. For a data set, it may be thought of as the “middle" value.
The sample median may or may not be an order statistic, since there is a single middle value only when the number n of observations is odd. More precisely, if n = 2 m +1 for some integer m , then the sample median is X ( m + 1 ) {\displaystyle X_{(m+1)}} and so is an order statistic.
The median absolute deviation is a measure of statistical dispersion. Moreover, the MAD is a robust statistic , being more resilient to outliers in a data set than the standard deviation . In the standard deviation, the distances from the mean are squared, so large deviations are weighted more heavily, and thus outliers can heavily influence it.
Each quartile is a median [8] calculated as follows. Given an even 2n or odd 2n+1 number of values first quartile Q 1 = median of the n smallest values third quartile Q 3 = median of the n largest values [8] The second quartile Q 2 is the same as the ordinary median. [8]
Splitting the observations either side of the median gives two groups of four observations. The median of the first group is the lower or first quartile, and is equal to (0 + 1)/2 = 0.5. The median of the second group is the upper or third quartile, and is equal to (27 + 61)/2 = 44. The smallest and largest observations are 0 and 63.
If there are an odd number of data points in the original ordered data set, include the median (the central value in the ordered list) in both halves. If there are an even number of data points in the original ordered data set, split this data set exactly in half. The lower quartile value is the median of the lower half of the data.
With an even number of observations, the median is the mean of the two middle observations, and the quartiles are the medians of the lower resp. upper half of the observations. Finding the median of half the observations, one may again have to consider either an odd or an even number of observations; hence the four cases above.
The median is the most trimmed statistic (nominally 50%), as it discards all but the most central data, and equals the fully trimmed mean – or indeed fully trimmed mid-range, or (for odd-size data sets) the fully trimmed maximum or minimum. Likewise, no degree of trimming has any effect on the median – a trimmed median is the median ...