mean In statistics, mean has two related meanings:

the arithmetic mean (and is distinguished from the geometric mean or harmonic mean). the expected value of a random variable, which is also called the population mean.

There are other statistical measures that should not be confused with averages - including 'median' and 'mode'. Other simple statistical analyses use measures of spread, such as range, interquartile range, or standard deviation. For a real-valued random variable X, the mean is the expectation of X. Note that not every probability distribution has a defined mean (or variance); see the Cauchy distribution for an example. For a data set, the mean is the sum of the values divided by the number of values. The mean of a set of numbers x1, x2, ..., xn is typically denoted by , pronounced "x bar". This mean is a type of arithmetic mean. If the data set were based on a series of observations obtained by sampling a statistical population, this mean is termed the "sample mean" ( ) to distinguish it from the "population mean" ( or x). The mean is often quoted along with the standard deviation: the mean describes the central location of the data, and the standard deviation describes the spread. An alternative measure of dispersion is the mean deviation, equivalent to the average absolute deviation from the mean. It is less sensitive to outliers, but less mathematically tractable. If a series of observations is sampled from a larger population (measuring the heights of a sample of adults drawn from the entire world population, for example), or from a probability distribution which gives the probabilities of each possible result, then the larger population or probability distribution can be used to construct a "population mean", which is also the expected value for a sample drawn from this population or probability distribution. For a finite population, this would simply be the arithmetic mean of the given property for every member of the population. For a probability distribution, this would be a sum or integral over every possible value weighted by the probability of that value. It is a universal convention to represent the population mean by the symbol .In the case of a discrete probability distribution, the mean of a discrete random variable x is given by taking the product of each possible value of x and its probability P(x), and then adding all these products together, giving The sample mean may differ from the population mean, especially for small samples, but the law of large numbers dictates that the larger the size of the

sample, the more likely it is that the sample mean will be close to the population mean

median In probability theory and statistics, median is described as the numerical value separating the higher half of a sample, a population, or a probability distribution, from the lower half. The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one. If there is an even number of observations, then there is no single middle value; the median is then usually defined to be the mean of the two middle values. In a sample of data, or a finite population, there may be no member of the sample whose value is identical to the median (in the case of an even sample size), and, if there is such a member, there may be more than one so that the median may not uniquely identify a sample member. Nonetheless, the value of the median is uniquely determined with the usual definition. A related concept, in which the outcome is forced to correspond to a member of the sample, is the medoid. At most, half the population have values less than the median, and, at most, half have values greater than the median. If both groups contain less than half the population, then some of the population is exactly equal to the median. For example, if a < b < c, then the median of the list {a, b, c} is b, and, if a < b < c < d, then the median of the list {a, b, c, d} is the mean of b and c; i.e., it is (b + c)/2. The median can be used as a measure of location when a distribution is skewed, when end-values are not known, or when one requires reduced importance to be attached to outliers, e.g., because they may be measurement errors.

mode

In statistics, the mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a data set or a probability distribution. In some fields, notably education, sample data are often called scores, and the sample mode is known as the modal score. Like the statistical mean and the median, the mode is a way of capturing important information about a random variable or a population in a single

quantity. The mode is in general different likely from the mean and median, and may be very different for strongly skewed distributions. The mode is not necessarily unique, since the same maximum frequency may be attained at different values. The most ambiguous case occurs in uniform distributions, wherein all values are equally.