From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data

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Describe measures of center

Describe measures of center

From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data

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Describe measures of center

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- [Instructor] A skilled chef can take a 25-ounce bottle of wine, and through the process of reduction, turn it into four ounces of its purest essence for a sauce. With data analysis, one of the most important things you can do is to take a large collection of numbers and reduce that collection to its essence by finding a single number that best represents all the rest of them. And most often, that single number is a measure of the center of the distribution. Now, the thing about the center is that it's the most concise summary possible. It's a single number. I like to think of it as if you had to describe your entire collection of data in a text message, this is probably what you would want to put. Keep it short and sweet. And there are three very common measures of center. There's a huge number of choices. But the three most common are the mode, the median, and the mean. And each of them applies in different circumstances, and has its own strengths and weaknesses. So let's take a…

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