Over the first five years of owning her car, Gina drove about 12,700 miles the first year, 15,478 miles the second year, 12,675 the third year, 11,850 the fourth year, and 13,075 the fifth year. Find the mean, median, and mode of this data.Explain which measure of central tendency will best priding how many miles she drive in sixth year.

Question

vocaloid · Answer

well, the easiest one is mode. since all the numbers are different, there is no mode

vocaloid · Answer

to find the mean, add them all up and divide by 5

vocaloid · Answer

since there aren't any outliers, the mean is the best measure of central tendency

arihangdu · Answer

How to know this?

arihangdu · Answer

How to know this?

vocaloid · Answer

hm, it's become intuitive to me at this point but

vocaloid · Answer

an "outlier" is a data point that is very different than the others. All of the data points are similar to each other (they're all in the low 10,000 range), so we can use the mean instead of the median

if there were an outlier (like, say that one of the numbers was like 50,000) then we would use the median, since the mean would be something big like 20,000 so it wouldn't be representative of the data

vocaloid · Answer

so TLDR: no outlier = use mean, outlier = use median

vocaloid · Answer

now, if you're wondering how we determine whether there's an outlier, there's a quartile test you can use but it requires a bit of calculation. for now, I would generally assume there is no outlier unless the outlier is obvious