Linked Questions
17 questions linked to/from Should the mean be used when data are skewed?
103
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If mean is so sensitive, why use it in the first place?
It is a known fact that median is resistant to outliers. If that is the case, when and why would we use the mean in the first place?
One thing I can think of perhaps is to understand the presence of ...
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51
votes
14
answers
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Why is median age a better statistic than mean age?
If you look at Wolfram Alpha
Or this Wikipedia page List of countries by median age
Clearly median seems to be the statistic of choice when it comes to ages.
I am not able to explain to myself why ...
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74
votes
3
answers
145k
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What does standard deviation tell us in non-normal distribution
In a normal distribution, the 68-95-99.7 rule imparts standard deviation a lot of meaning, but what would standard deviation mean in a non-normal distribution (multimodal or skewed)? Would all data ...
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8
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5
answers
3k
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How Well Does the Mean Describe a Multimodal Probability Distribution?
When you have highly skewed, irregular or multimodal distributions:
In these instances, does it become more advantageous to use the median instead of the mean to infer properties of these ...
24
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5
answers
5k
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Why not always use bootstrap CIs?
I was wondering how bootstrap CIs (and BCa in barticular) perform on normally-distributed data. There seems to be lots of work examining their performance on various types of distributions, but could ...
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6
votes
3
answers
1k
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Is mode a measure of central tendency?
I am just starting out with my stat basics and that’s where I came across measures of central tendency. In one of the books measure of central tendency is defined as a measure which yield information ...
3
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1
answer
4k
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What are good methods to deal with outliers when calculating mean of data?
I have a dataframe with yearly energy uses of buildings over 5 years. In order to have a representative yearly energy use for data modelling, I'll have to take the mean of those data. As the data can ...
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3
votes
2
answers
2k
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When to use mean or median?
I am asked to put together some KPIs. I'm breaking down what the general lifespan of our subscribers is by industry.
There are some industries I feel outliers are impacting what the average would be, ...
- 171
9
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0
answers
4k
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Mean, median, or mode of skewed posterior?
I'm estimating an ICC from 2 and 3-level hierarchical models using rstanarm. The simplest models are: y ~ (1|group) or ...
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3
votes
2
answers
1k
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Why is the center of data important?
I have recently begun learning statistics along with Python with the Anaconda IDE and started a Machine Learning course by Andrew Ng. I understand the mathematics behind what I am doing as the ...
-2
votes
1
answer
3k
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Statistics to use on Bimodal data
What summary statistics, mean, median, standard deviation, etc. should be used on a skewed, bimodal, dataset and why? These are almost U shaped in a histogram layout with a slight preference for lower ...
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2
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1
answer
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mean variance of multimodal distribution
This may be too much of a simplistic question: but is it correct to say that it simply doesn't make sense to compute averages/means of data that is fundamentally multimodal? That is, there is not one ...
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5
votes
1
answer
590
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Is there a "smooth" version of a median of a data set?
So I'm thinking about how one would compare sizes of past civilizations in terms of population size and territory, and imagining that the distributions are basically continuous variables. I know ...
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4
votes
1
answer
144
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How do you interpret an arithmetic mean without knowing the underlying distribution?
Looking at Google Analytics, I can't help but think that the summary stats which present averages have the potential to be very misleading (and probably are, in practice). For some of these summary ...
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3
votes
1
answer
298
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What does "middle of the data" really mean?
I have some noisy time series data for different climate variables and I want to know overall if they are increasing or decreasing with time. From this Water Resources Statistics Guide, the LOWESS ...
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