Blockbust video collected data to figure out how many movies they were renting per month. After 5 months, the store wanted to analyze their data to find diffrent statistical measures.
Data:
Month Movies Rented
1 523
2 625
3 550
4 604
5 864
outlier: 864
Question: which statistical measure would you use if an outlier is present (mean, median, mode, range)? Explain.
I would use median.
explain why you would use median.
The corect answer would be median.
The reason is simple. With an outlier present mean, mode, and range's outcome would all be effected were as to the middle number (median) would not be effected at all.
When dealing with data that has an outlier, it's often advisable to use the median instead of the mean as a statistical measure. The median is the middle value in a set of data when arranged in ascending or descending order. In this case, the median would be the value that falls right in the middle of the data.
To find the median:
1. Arrange the data in ascending or descending order.
Month: Movies Rented:
1 523
2 550
3 604
4 625
5 864
2. Since we have an odd number of data points, the median will be the value in the middle. In this case, it is the value for Month 3, which is 604.
The reason we use the median when there's an outlier is that the mean is highly influenced by extreme values. In this case, the outlier of 864 is substantially larger than the rest of the data, and including it in the calculation of the mean would significantly skew the result upwards. The median, on the other hand, is less affected by outliers as it focuses on the central value.
So, the statistical measure to use in this case is the median.