Measures of Central Tendency

This section is going to be interesting. Please go through it even if the subject seems a bit familiar.

Think of central tendency as the phenomenon of data concentrating in one place. You are trying to find where the fat middle is; you could use it to make further impressions about the data set.

It's important to know this because, many times, your actions are aimed at having as high an impact as possible, and you would want those to be directed at that part of the population that helps the cause.

Take populist reforms by a government, for example. Some of these are aimed at that segment of the population that forms the fat middle. The data set used could be income levels, education levels, or other demographics.

How do you identify this fat middle?

There are three broad metrics to get to that - Mean, Median and Mode.

We are going to talk about the Mean, Median, and Mode in the next section. What they are, why we have three of them, and how good a summary each of them provides.