Central Tendency - Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of Central Tendency

The following may be applied to one-dimensional data, after transformation, although some of these involve their own implicit transformation of the data.

  • Arithmetic mean (or simply, mean) – the sum of all measurements divided by the number of observations in the data set
  • Median – the middle value that separates the higher half from the lower half of the data set
  • Mode – the most frequent value in the data set
  • Geometric mean – the nth root of the product of the data values
  • Harmonic mean – the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals of the data values
  • Weighted mean – an arithmetic mean that incorporates weighting to certain data elements
  • Distance-weighted estimator – the measure uses weighting coefficients for xi that are computed as the inverse mean distance between xi and the other data points.
  • Truncated mean – the arithmetic mean of data values after a certain number or proportion of the highest and lowest data values have been discarded.
  • Midrange – the arithmetic mean of the maximum and minimum values of a data set.
  • Midhinge – the arithmetic mean of the two quartiles.
  • Trimean – the weighted arithmetic mean of the median and two quartiles.
  • Winsorized mean – an arithmetic mean in which extreme values are replaced by values closer to the median.

Any of the above may be applied to each dimension of multi-dimensional data and, in addition, there is the

  • Geometric median - which minimizes the sum of distances to the data points. This is the same as the median when applied to one-dimensional data, but it is not the same as taking the median of each dimension independently.

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