Measures of Central Tendency

DEFINITION OF AVERAGE
"An average is an attempt to find one single
figure to describe the whole of figures".
- Clark and Sekkade
"Average is a value which is typical or
representative of a set of data".
- Murray R.
Spiegal
VARIOUS MEASURES OF AVERAGE
Various measures of average can be classified into
the following three categories:
(a) Mathematical Averages :
(i) Arithmetic Mean or Mean
(ii) Geometric Mean
(iii) Harmonic Mean
(b) Positional Averages:
(i) Median
(ii) Mode
(c) Commercial Average
(i) Moving Average
(ii) Progressive Average
(iii) Composite Average
ARITHMETIC MEAN
Arithmetic Mean is defined as the sum of
observations divided by the number of
observations. It can be computed in two
ways :
(i) Simple arithmetic mean and
(ii) weighted arithmetic mean.
 Measures of Central Tendency
Mean – the arithmetic average. This is used
for continuous data.
Median – a value that splits the data into two
halves, that is, one half of the data is smaller
than that number, the other half larger. May be
used for continuous or ordinal data.
Mode – this is the category that has the most
data. As the description implies it is used for
categorical data.
Individual series:
What’s the mean of the following test scores?

56, 65, 75, 83, 92