Introduction to Measures of Central Tendency

Measures of Central Tendency

Introduction

A measure of central tendency is a value that attempts to describe a set of data by identifying the center position in the data set. Therefore, measures of central tendency sometimes called measures of central location. They are also classified as summary statistics. The mean (often called the average) is most likely the measure of central tendency that you are most familiar with, but there are others, such as the median and the mode.

The mean, median and mode are all valid measures of central tendency, but under different conditions, some measures of central tendency become more convenient to use than others. In the following sections, we will look at the mean, mode and median, and learn how to calculate them and under what conditions they are most appropriate to be used.

Measure of central tendency

•          Mean
•        Median
•          Mode