Question

how one way of central tendency is not always the “best” way to get the one in the middle? thank you

Answer 1

Basically there are three ways to calculate the central tendency: Mean,Mode and Median

Mean : It is used in both discrete and continuous data but its use is most often with continuous data .The mean is equal to the sum of all the values in the data set divided by the number of values in the data set.An important property of the mean is that it includes every value in your data set as part of the calculation. In addition, the mean is the only measure of central tendency where the sum of the deviations of each value from the mean is always zero.

Mode: This is the maximum frequency of a certain data point in the given data set.On a histogram it represents the highest bar in a bar chart or histogram. Mainly it is used for categorical data where we wish to know which is the most common category.

Median:The median is the middle score for a set of data that has been arranged in order of magnitude.

The median is less affected by outliers and skewed data.

When data points of the data set highly varied or fluctuated then middle one data point by median will not be appropriate  as it will give the correct central tendency but if we have skewed data the we should prefer median as it does't affected by the outliers and skewed data.

So the selection of central tendency depend upon the type of priority and the type of data set.