4.4 Measures of central tendency
4.4.1 Calculating the mean
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The mean can be calculated only for numeric variables, no matter if they are discrete or continuous. It’s obtained by simply dividing the sum of all values in a data set by the number of values. The calculation can be done from raw data or for data aggregated in a frequency table. Here are a few examples of calculation.
Example 1 – Soccer tournament at Mount Rival
Mount Rival hosts a soccer tournament each year. This season, in 10 games, the lead scorer for the home team scored 7, 5, 0, 7, 8, 5, 5, 4, 1 and 5 goals. What is the mean score of this player?
The sum of all values is 47 and there are 10 values. Therefore, the mean is 47 ÷ 10 = 4.7 goals per game.
Example 2 – Traffic fatalities
The following table lists the number of people killed in traffic accidents over a 10-year period. During this period, what was the average number of people having lost life every year? How many people died each day on average in traffic accidents?
Year | Deaths |
---|---|
2009 | 623 |
2010 | 583 |
2011 | 959 |
2012 | 1,037 |
2013 | 960 |
2014 | 797 |
2015 | 663 |
2016 | 652 |
2017 | 560 |
2018 | 619 |
Total | 7,453 |
The total number of deaths is presented in the table (7,453). To get the yearly average, the number of deaths is divided by 10 which gives 745.3 deaths per year. To get the daily average, the yearly average is divided by 365 which gives approximately 2 deaths per day.
For a larger data set, it can be easier to summarize data in a frequency table before calculating the mean. In this case, you need to weight each possible value by the frequency of the value to calculate the total.
Example 3 – Soccer tournament at Mount Rival
Let’s go back to Mount Rival soccer tournament. Suppose that five teams were competing, each of them including 10 players for a total of 50 players. The number of goals scored by each player was compiled and results were summarized in the frequency table below. For example, we can see that eight players scored only one goal during the tournament. What is the average number of goals scored by the players during the tournament?
Number of goals scored | Number of players |
---|---|
0 | 2 |
1 | 8 |
2 | 14 |
3 | 12 |
4 | 8 |
5 | 4 |
6 | 2 |
0 true zero or a value rounded to zero |
You first need to calculate the total number of goals scored. To do that, you take each observed value of the number of goals scored, which are values 0 to 6, and you multiply each value by the number of players:
0 × 2 + 1 × 8 + 2 × 14 + 3 × 12 + 4 × 8 + 5 × 4 + 6 × 2 = 136
Since there are 50 players, the average is 136 ÷ 50 = 2.72 goals per player.
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