Average
This is an old revision of this page, as edited by SeanTheSheep (talk | contribs) at 13:28, May 11, 2007. It may differ significantly from current revision.
Average is a term in mathematics used to measure the 'central tendency' or 'expected value' of a data set; in conversational terms, it would be expected to be a value somewhere in the middle of the data.
There are various descriptive statistics that can be chosen as a measurement of the this central tendency, such as the mode, the median and the mean, this latter coming in a variety of forms: harmonic mean, geometric mean and arithmetic mean. The arithmetic mean is the most common type of mean, and it is the one that most people would generally take as the average.
Thus one way of defining the average would be:
- the sum of a group of numbers divided by the number of numbers it the group.
Please see the table of mathematical symbols for explanations of the symbols used.
Example of calculation
The average of 3, 5, and 7 is <math>15 \div 3=5</math>.