Mean, Median and Mode: What Are They and When Should You Use Them?

A look at the measure of average values with Python/Pandas examples

I haven’t written much over the last month, or at least, I’ve not finished writing much. But I’ve been reading David Spiegelhalter’s excellent book, The Art of Statistics, particularly comments about how stats are used in the press and by others in the public life, such as politicians.

You probably remember Mean, Median, and Mode from high school stats classes but they are often misused in public communicatuons. In the article below, I look at how they ought to be used and give Python and Pandas examples.

Mean, Median and Mode: What Are They and When Should You Use Them?

I highly recommend Spiegelhalter’s book. It doesn’t go into technicalities but shows how modern statistical thinking can be used in real life drawing on examples from how patterns in data showed how Britain’s most prolific serial killer betrayed his guilt, through investigating hospital success rates, to whether or not eating too many bacon sandwiches will give you cancer and many other examples from the real world many of which Spiegelhalter has been personally involved in.

If you’d like to take a look, the Amazon link to the book is below.

The Art of Statistics: How to Learn from Data, David Spiegelhalter, 2021

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