Mean

How it is used

Statisticians say 'mean'; business people usually say 'average'. You calculate, compare or report a mean. Because outliers and skewed data pull it easily, analysts often report it together with the median.

Example sentences

1. The mean session length is eight minutes, but most sessions are under two.

2. Can you add the mean and the median to the summary table?

Common collocations

• calculate the mean
• sample mean
• mean value
• mean and standard deviation

Related terms

• medianThe middle value when all the numbers in a group are sorted from smallest to largest; half the values are below it and half are above it.
• standard deviationA measure of how spread out values are around the mean: a small value means most values are close to the average, a large one means they vary a lot.
• outlierA value that is very far from most of the other values in a dataset, for example one order of 50,000 dollars among orders of around 40 dollars.
• skewedDescribes a distribution that is not symmetrical and has a long tail of values on one side, such as income data where a few people earn far more than most.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

• mean · Data Science & Analytics
• mean · Statistics
• mean · Academic English & Research

More terms: Machine Learning and Data Processing

• artificial intelligence
• machine learning
• model
• dataset
• training data
• label
• train
• supervised learning
• neural network
• deep learning
• loss function
• overfitting