20120803 - Measures of central tendency

[Technology]

[<Normal page] [PEREZGONZALEZ Jose D [ed] (2012). Measures of central tendency. Journal of Knowledge Advancement & Integration (ISSN 1177-4576), 2012, pages 234-235.]

Measures of central tendency

In statistics, measures of central tendency are a group of mathematical technologies (ie, procedures or formulas) used for summarising data. These measures may also be known as averages, and typically refer to the following:

role	name
The mid-range value in a distribution	mid-range
The most typical or frequent value in a distribution	mode
The value in the middle of the range once all values in the distribution are arranged in an ordinal manner	median
The value which is the most equidistant to all other values in the distribution	arithmetic mean

Although these measures of central tendency inform about the average value in a distribution of scores, more complete information about the distribution can be obtained by complimenting those with their corresponding measures of dispersion.