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Statistics vocabulary · Descriptive Statistics

Median

Meaning in statistics, with examples

/ˈmiːdiən/nounCore term

In statistics, median means: The middle value when the data are put in order from smallest to largest; with an even number of values, it is the mean of the two middle ones.

In Turkish: medyan, ortanca

How it is used

Preferred over the mean for skewed data such as income, house prices or reaction times, because extreme values hardly affect it. Reports often give the median with the interquartile range: 'median 42 (IQR 35–51)'.

Example sentences

  1. Because household income is skewed, we report the median rather than the mean.

  2. The median waiting time fell from 18 to 11 minutes after the change.

Common collocations

  • median income
  • median value
  • report the median
  • median and IQR
  • meanThe sum of all the values divided by the number of values; the usual 'average' that describes the centre of a set of numbers.
  • modeThe value that appears most often in a data set. A distribution can have one mode, two (bimodal) or several.
  • quartileOne of the three values that divide ordered data into four equal parts: the first quartile (Q1), the median (Q2) and the third quartile (Q3).
  • interquartile rangeThe distance between the first and third quartiles (Q3 − Q1), showing how spread out the middle 50% of the data is.
  • skewedDescribes a distribution that is not symmetric and has a longer tail on one side; in a right-skewed distribution a few very large values stretch the tail to the right.

This word in other fields

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

More terms: Descriptive Statistics

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