Introduction to Measures of Center

What you’ll learn to do: Use mean and median to describe the center of a distribution.

In this section, we define three different measures of center: mean, median, and mode, all of which are different ways to define an average. Casually speaking, the “typical” value in the distribution can be roughly represented by these measures of center. Depending on the data and its distribution, one measure of center might be most informative or most representative of the “typical” value. In analyzing quantitative data, the measure of center will be one key component.