In this particular case, even if there were very small outliers (say if 2 out of the 47 people actually earned only $5,000 a year), they would not significantly affect the result, but in different scenarios they could have a significant effect. In contrast, the median, since it is exactly in the middle of the values, isn't affected by either very large or very small values, and better represents the data since the median is what 94% of people in the room earn. Clearly this is not a good representation of what the average person in the room earns. Find the arithmetic mean of these two numbers to find the medianĮven though there are only three people who earn more than $55,000 in this example, and they comprise only 6% of the people in the room, because they earn vastly more, they skewed the mean income such that the value is almost 12 times more than what 94% of the people in the room earn. If there is an even number of digits in step 1, round the result of step 3 up and down to the nearest whole number these two numbers indicate the position of the two middle numbers in the data set.If there is an odd number of digits in step 1, the result of step 3 indicates the position of the median in the data set.Determine how many numbers there are total.For longer sets of data, if we know how many numbers there are in total (or can count them), we can perform basic division to quickly determine which number is in the middle: The data sets in the examples above only had a few numbers, so we could determine the middle values just by looking at them. How to quickly determine the number in the middle Note that it is possible that we could've gotten lucky and that 12 could've been in the middle of the first set of data, but we should not be trying to determine the median unless the data is listed in ascending or descending order. We need to first rearrange the numbers before attempting to determine the median. Since there is an even number of values in the data set, we need to find the arithmetic mean of the two middle numbers, 5 and 4: 6 is the median, since it is the number in the middle.Ģ.
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