Central tendency
Central tendency is a term used in some fields of
empirical research to refer to what statisticians sometimes call "location". A "measure of central tendency" is either a
location parameter or a
statistic used to estimate a location parameter. Examples include:
- Arithmetic mean, the sum of all data divided by the number of observations in the data set.
- Median, the value that separates the highest half from the lowest half of the data set.
- Mode, the most frequent value in the data set.
Other examples include the the midrange (the mean of the highest and lowest values of the data or distribution), and the
truncated mean used in some sports scoring with the particular case of the
interquartile mean.
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