Question

Of the mean, median, and mode, which measure of center is most affected by outliers? Explain your reasoning including an example with at least 10 data points.

put it as an 6th grader

Answer 1

[AI-generated answer — Bot GPT 3.5]

Outliers can have the biggest impact on the mean because they can make the average higher or lower than it should be. For example, if we have the following data points representing the number of goals scored by each player in a soccer team: 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 50. The mean would be (2+3+4+5+6+7+8+9+10+50)/10 = 9.4. The outlier of 50 greatly skews the mean to be higher than most of the data points.

On the other hand, the median and mode are less affected by outliers because they only focus on the middle or most common values. The median of the data points in the example above would be 6.5, and the mode would be 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 because none of these values appear more than once.