Arithmetic Mean

From Open Risk Manual

Definition

Arithmetic Mean. Sum of a collection of numbers divided by the number of numbers in the collection

While the arithmetic mean is often used to report central tendencies, it is not a robust statistic, meaning that it is greatly influenced by outliers (values that are very much larger or smaller than most of the values).

Notably, for skewed distributions, such as the distribution of income for which a few people's incomes are substantially greater than most people's, the arithmetic mean may not accord with one's notion of 'middle', and robust statistics, such as the median, may be a better description of central tendency.

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This entry annotates a FIBO Ontology Class. FIBO is a trademark and the FIBO Ontology is copyright of the EDM Council, released under the MIT Open Source License. There is no guarantee that the content of this page will remain aligned with, or correctly interprets, the concepts covered by the FIBO ontology.