Monday, July 2, 2012

Median in Statistics


In statistics we use Mean Median and Mode to obtain information about the given data from the sample set of observed values. Let us consider a data, 26, 15, 33, 25, 28, 17, 37 is the data of the number of marbles a set of boys have with them. How do we find the middle value or the number which comes exactly in the middle of the list? To find the middle value, we need to find the Median Value which is the value exactly in the middle of the data when the data is arranged in the ascending order that is the smallest to greatest value. Let us arrange the data in the numerical order, 15,17,25,26,28,33,37. The Median Value or the middle value is 26.

Median in Math is one type of average in the branch of statistics in which we consider the middle value of the given data which is arranged in a numerical order in other words from smallest to greatest value.Median Math that is Median in statistics a branch of mathematics is the middle value of the data, which separates the data into two equal halves; which means fifty percent of the numbers are above the median and fifty percent of the numbers are below the median. And if there is even number of values in the data then the median is the mean of the two middle values. The Median in Math is a very useful number in cases when the distribution has very large extreme values which would otherwise skew the data.

Let us consider a data and learn the methods used in Finding Median.
39, 26, 7, 21, 3, 48, 67, 36
First we need to arrange the given data in the increasing order.
3,7,21,26,36,39,48,67
As you can see, the number of values in the data is even. We know that if the number of values in the given data is odd we can easily find the Median; the value exactly in the middle of the data. You might wonder, if the number of values is even then how to go about? We use a simple method in Finding Median in such cases; here, we get two middle values or two medians, so we just take the average of these two to get the actual median of the data.

There are 8 values in the given data; the two middle values are 26 and 36. To find the Median we find the mean of these values
(26 +36)/2 = 31
The required Median is 31

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