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Talk:Averages/Mode: Difference between revisions
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:Let me expand on this: Does anyone ''object'' to my renaming [[Mean]], [[Median]], [[Mode]], [[Standard Deviation]], [[Moving Average]] according to this scheme? (I would also rename [[Standard Deviation]] to [[Average/Running standard deviation]] so that there's an obvious place for an all-at-once standard deviation.
:: No objection to the scheme, but might I suggest "statistics" instead? Or the more traditionally wiki-esque "Mean (statistics)", "Median (statistics)", etc? --[[User:Short Circuit|Short Circuit]] 03:14, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
:::Statistics is a very broad category covering a ''lot'' of different kinds of tasks, whereas averages all have something in common. WP says:
::::An average is a single value that is meant to typify a list of values. If all the numbers in the list are the same, then this number should be used. If the numbers are not all the same, . . . the average is calculated by combining the values from the set in a specific way and computing a single number as being the average of the set.
:::This seems to me to be a useful classification. (I now realize my inclusion of Standard Deviation in the list above was incorrect; while it does compute a single number from a collection, that number is not an average.) Using a prefix rather than a suffix has benefits for sorting. Additionally, averages are not merely statistical techniques: they can give exact answers to certain problems. (Er, I think. I'm having trouble thinking up an example of this at the moment (and it's rather late).) --03:56, 15 August 2009 (UTC)
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