Material Detail

Averages are meant to convey the essential features of a set of data, or a random variable, in a simple and a concise way. Like any other summary, an average can be misleading, misused and abused; there is a fair amount of literature on this aspect of averages, the book by D. Huff(1973) being a particularly readable account. In one intuitive use of averages there is a source of error which can be quite serious and which is often not recognized. This source of error is illustrated below by a quality control problem, a project, an experiment and a game. A Taylor series expansion gives an insight into the nature of the error.

Disciplines:

• Mathematics and Statistics  / Statistics and Probability