ABSTRACT
Researchers use exploratory and descriptive statistics for such tasks as describing a sample, providing a quantitative summary of a variable, summarizing a data set and similar purposes. These four types of measurements make it possible to reduce a large data set to a smaller amount of meaningful numbers that everyone can understand. They provide essential information about the internal structure of the raw data. The main purpose for measurements of location (measures of central tendency) is to identify the value in the data set that is “most typical” of the full set. This “typical” value may then be used as a summary value. Several numbers can be used as measures of location. The mean (algebraic, geometric and trimmed mean), the median and the mode are described in this chapter.
