Whats the difference between average, mean and median?
Average comes in three flavors, all of which try to capture some idea of what’s “typical” in some group. These flavors are mean, median and mode. Mean is the most commonly used type of average, add up all the stuff and divide by the number of cases. Median is the point where half the stuff is above and half is below. It’s more useful than mean in cases where there’s some small number of really big or really small things that might make the mean deceptively large or small. i.e. if you have 20 people, 19 of whom make $10,000 a year and one makes $1,000,000 a year, the typical person in the group makes $10,000 a year, not $59,500 a year. Mode is rarely seen, but it simply means the most common possible result. For instance, in a group of 8th grade students, you might have some 12 year olds and some 14 year olds, but more of them will be 13 years old than any other number, so the mode represents the age of the typical 8th grader. If you have a lot of things in your sample and graph the num
