In: Statistics and Probability
What are specific cultural populations in which mean or median mode is inappropriate
Mean - It is inappropriate to use mean when we are dealing with
data containing outliers or which have skewed distributions. For
example, it is unwise to calculate the monthly mean income of
families living in a city, because income values may be outliers or
the distribution of incomes may be skewed.
Median - It is inappropriate to use median when data does not
contain any outliers; it is recommended to use the mean in these
kind of situations. For example, it is not recommended to calculate
the median height of students in a class. It is better to calculate
the mean height.
Mode - It is inapprorpiate to use mode with data which are not
categorical in nature, more specifically, which are continuous in
nature. In continuous data, it is very rare to find a value which
is more frequent than the other. For example, if we want to measure
the weight of residents in a neighbourhood, it is not recommended
to use the mode. We can very well use the mean in this case.