MEDIAN > RANGE

MEDIAN

A D B

F G E

C H

MODE > MEAN

Measures of Central Tendency (Mean, Median, Mode)

A measure of central tendency is a summary statistic that represents the center point or typical

value of a dataset. These measures indicate where most values in a distribution fall and are also

referred to as the central location of a distribution.

You can think of it as the tendency of data to cluster around a middle value. In statistics, the

three most common measures of central tendency are the mean, median, and mode. Each of these

measures calculates the location of the central point using a different method.

The three common measures of central tendency of a distribution are the arithmetic mean, the

median and the mode. As distributions become more skewed the difference between these

different measures of central tendency gets larger. The mode is the most commonly occurring

value in a distribution, population or sample.

Three Types of Distribution (Symmetric, Positive, Skewed, Negative Skewed)

For skewed distributions, it is quite common to have one tail of the distribution considerably

longer or drawn out relative to the other tail. A "skewed right" distribution is one in which the

tail is on the right side. A "skewed left" distribution is one in which the tail is on the left side.

Skewness refers to distortion or asymmetry in a symmetrical bell curve, or normal distribution,

in a set of data. If the curve is shifted to the left or to the right, it is said to be skewed. Skewness

can be quantified as a representation of the extent to which a given distribution varies from a

normal distribution. A normal distribution has a skew of zero, while a lognormal distribution, for

example, and would exhibit some degree of right-skew.