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Measures of Central Location

Measures of Central Location

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

  1. To learn the concept of the "center" of a data set.
  2. To learn the meaning of each of three measures of the center of a data set - the mean, the median, and the mode - and how to compute each one.
This section could be titled "three kinds of averages of a data set". Any kind of "average" is meant to be an answer to the question "Where do the data center?" It is thus a measure of the central location of the data set. We will see that the nature of the data set, as indicated by a relative frequency histogram, will determine what constitutes a good answer. Different shapes of the histogram call for different measures of central location.

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