Why is mean not a good measure of central tendency???

Question

trancenova · Answer

Well wikipedia tells us that central tendency is "a measure of the "middle" value of the data set".

Now imagine if you had some data that looked like this:  (2, 3, 2, 5, 4, 2, 3, 136) Now the mean would be 19.625, do you think that the mean is a good representation of the "middle" of the data? Sometimes the mean can be very bias. What do you think?

anonymous · Answer

It depends. Measures of CT include mean, mode, geometric mean, and median. Typically the mean requires perfect data and requires time to compute when the samples become large. When that is the case the mean becomes a poor measure. In which case, go to median. It's faster.