ABSTRACT
Mean, median, mode and standard deviation Statistics is a field of mathematics that pertains to data analysis. In many real-life situations, it is helpful to describe data by a single number that is most representative of the entire collection of numbers. Such a number is called a measure of central tendency; the most commonly used measures are mean, median, mode and standard deviation, the latter being the average distance between the actual data and the mean. Statistics is important in the field of engineering since it provides tools to analyse collected data. For example, a chemical engineer may wish to analyse temperature measurements from a mixing tank. Statistical methods can be used to determine how reliable and reproducible the temperature measurements are, how much the temperature varies within the data set, what future temperatures of the tank may be, and how confident the engineer can be in the temperature measurements made. When performing statistical analysis on a set of data, the mean, median, mode and standard deviation are all helpful values to calculate; this chapter explains how to determine these measures of central tendency.
