Comment on Why do we use average instead of mode?

jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

• Nemo@midwest.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Mean is the default “average” because it’s easy to calculate and were taught it first in school. Like, years before median or mode. That’s it, that’s the whole reason.

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  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    That makes perfect sense to me. I should have known it was that boring.

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    • oo1@kbin.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Poor old Chebychev is not getting much love here is he.

      I guess people might think he was a fan of inequality. (sorry - maths joke, at least I didn't do the one about the LOL numbers).

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      • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        I didn’t get that far in probability and statistics. I know of his polynomials, but that was a long time ago.

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• Cethin@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Mode also is only similar to median in a normal distribution. Anything else and mode and median are very different.

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• JoBo@feddit.uk ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  such as the average net worth of the people in a country.

  And the mean average makes no sense here either, which is why incomes and wealth are almost always quoted as medians instead of means, unless they’re totals which is a roundabout way of reporting the mean (if you know the population baseline).

  The more unequal a country, the larger the difference between mean and median incomes.

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• fastandcurious@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

  Sorry, i meant mean, but yeah mode definitely seems better to me, you are very unlikely to find a person/thing who/that has average qualities/stats

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  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Now I understand better how you’re thinking. Indeed, the notion of “what the average person has” is answered better by the median, but the notion of “What’s most typical” is answered by the mode.

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    • fastandcurious@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

      Actually I think that the notion ‘what the average person has’ is bettered answered by mode, I feel like mean is better for kind of plotting a data or points to find a ‘trend’ or something like that, I am hella confused now actually

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      • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

        The mode can’t hope to answer how much money the average person has, because there are far too many possible values.

        The mean answers how much money people have on average, but the outliers exert too much influence to answer how much money the average person has.

        The median moderates the influence of both the very rich and the very poor, so it better approximates the amount of money that those in the middle of the population have.

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  • jbrains@sh.itjust.works ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago

    Well, the middle line is the median. 😉

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