Measures of central tendency

The best way to reduce a set of data and still retain part of the information, is to summarize the set with a single value. But how can you calculate a number that is representative of an entire list of numbers?

Measures of central tendency—mean, median, and mode—can help you capture, with a single number, what is typical of the data.

The mean is the average value of all the data in the set.

The median is the value that has exactly half the data above it and half below it.

The mode is the value that occurs most frequently in the set.

In a normal distribution, mean, median and mode are identical in value.