What are the measures of central tendency in statistics?

Answer 1

Mean, median, and mode.

The arithmetic mean is the simplest and most common of all statistics. Add all the values of the observations, and divide by the total number of observations. That's it.

To arrive at the median, rank order the values of the observations from lowest to highest, and look at the middle value. This is your median. In the event the number of observations is even, take the mean of the middle two values (where the median would be if there were an odd number of observations).

The mode is simply that number in the data set that appears most. Data distributions (or the pattern of your data) can have two modes, three modes, or any number of modes, provided all the values are equal in frequency. Alternatively, distributions can have no mode at all.

In the distribution below, there are 3 modes:

1 1 1 2 2 2 3 3 3

the values 1, 2, & 3 each appear 3 times. The median is 2 (it is smack dab in the middle of the distribution), and the mean is:

(3(1)+3(2)+3(3))/9=2