Understanding measures of central tendency

A measure of central tendency is a summary of a dataset in a single number. The name comes from the fact that these values should be in the center of your distribution and should be the value with the highest probability of occurring. Overall, because they are useful summaries, they are often used as variables in other statistical analyses. You can use them by themselves. It is easiest to compare two averages than to compare every value in two datasets.

There are a few different ones, but in common practice, you will only come across three:

• Mean
• Median
• Mode

You may have heard of these before, but let’s go over them briefly.

Mean

The mean is also called the average. To find the average, you take the sum of the values and divide them by the number of values. This may be simple, but let’s break it into steps:

1. Find the sum of the values.
2. Divide the sum by the number of values.

Let...