Measures of Central Location

This section elaborates on mean, median, and mode at the population level and sample level. This section also contains many interesting examples of range, variance, and standard deviation. Complete the exercises and check your answers.

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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