Content
Learn different ways to measure the "center," or typical values, of a set of data: mean, median, and mode.
Want a deeper conceptual understanding? Try our interactive lesson!
No exercises available for this concept.
Practice exam-style measuring center problems
The mean of a numerical dataset is the average of all the values:
The mean is also sometimes denoted ​μ.
The median of a dataset is the middle value when the values are sorted. If a dataset has an even number of values, the median is the average of the middle two.
Mathematically, the median is the
value. Notice that if ​n​ is even then ​2n+1​​ is halfway between two consecutive integers, indicating we need to average their values.
The mode of a dataset is the most common value in a dataset.
If all the values have the same frequency (​[1,2,3]​), there is no mode. If multiple - but not all - values share the highest frequency, then we have multiple modes (​[1,2,2,3,3]​).