Talk:Central tendency

message: A Google search for "central tendency" and "department of statistics" will demonstrate that the term is used by statisticians.Jfitzg
:: ok.. whats your point? Fresheneesz 23:34, 18 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: used by statisticians

message: :Feel free to state your position on the renaming proposal by beginning a new line in this section with *Support or *Oppose, then sign your comment with ~~~~. Since polling is not a substitute for discussion, please explain your reasons, taking into account Wikipedia's policy on article titles.
*Oppose The article contains sources specifically for "central tendency". No sources have been given for "measure of central tendency". The article is about a quality a distribution might have, in the same way that "skewness" and "kurtosis" are qualities not  particular ways of measuring these things. Note that Wikipedia is not a mathmatics encyclopedia so "It's just a Math thing" doesn't wash. And, if you don't know what you are trying to measure, how can you measure it? Melcombe (talk) 16:28, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Survey

message: Since Melcombe has reverted my effort to improve the first sentence, someone needs to go into it and fix the style problem I identified earlier on this talk page. Wikipedia articles are not supposed to start out In statistics, the term central tendency relates to the way in which.... They are supposed to start out In statistics, a probability distribution's central tendency is.... The fact that the article has long used "relates to" instead of "is" may be due to Dingo1729's observation that "Central tendency is vague and open to interpretation", and thus is hard to define. Duoduoduo (talk) 21:28, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Lead sentence 

message: Currently the article just mentions the idea that a central tendency may or may not exist for a distribution:
:If a central tendency does not exist for a population, its distribution may be bimodal, multimodal or U-shaped.
But after the lead, the three main sections and sub-sections are "Measures of central tendency", "Measures of location", and "Measures of spread". Melcombe argues above that the article should keep its current title "Central tendency" rather than "Measure of central tendency". If that view prevails, then the article really needs to answer these two questions:
*How do we determine whether a distribution has a central tendency?
*If we determine that it does indeed have one, how do we determine which choice or choices of central tendency are valid to use for this distribution? Duoduoduo (talk) 21:40, 20 April 2013 (UTC)
thread_title:  Needs to answer these two questions 

message: The dictionary entry under discussion is 
:The tendency of quantitative data to cluster around some random variable value. The position of the central value is usually determined by one of the measures of location such as the mean , median or mode. The closeness with which values cluster round the central value is measured by one of the measures of dispersion such as the mean deviation or standard deviation.
One proposed wording for the article's lede is 
:Some statistical dictionaries define central tendency (or centrality), to mean "The tendency of quantitative data to cluster around some central value."
The other proposed wording is 
:Some statistical dictionaries adopt a wider definition of central tendency (or centrality), to include not only the central location but also the degree of centrality, i.e., the statistical dispersion.
Both of these seem to be to be accurate renditions of what the source says. I suggest this compromise wording:
:Some statistical dictionaries define central tendency (or centrality), to mean "the tendency of quantitative data to cluster around some central value," with this tendency measured by both the central location and the degree of centrality, i.e., the statistical dispersion.
Duoduoduo (talk) 15:55, 6 May 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: More on two meanings

message: This article seems to have moved beyond being a stub; I'm re-rating it as start-class, if no one objects. -Bryanrutherford0 (talk) 20:19, 22 July 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Start-class

message: An IP has added the quadratic mean (rms) to the list. Is it ever really used as a measure of central tendency? The biggest problem comes when there are negative values, so then it isn't anywhere near the center of the distribution. I'm somewhat inclined to revert, but I thought I'd ask for opinions first. I've mentioned this on the IP's talk page. Dingo1729 (talk) 16:12, 9 February 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: No one else seems interested so I re-wrote that entry. Dingo1729 (talk) 05:13, 16 February 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  Quadratic Mean 

message: In the "Solutions to variational problems" section, in paragraph 4, we have this sentence:
For p = 0 the limiting values are 0^0 = 0 and a^0 = 0...
By my reading, this should say:
For p = 0 the limiting values are 0^0 = 0 and a^0 = 1...
That's because the typical situation where a^0 = 1 for a \ne 0 is what makes the formulation of mode in terms of a minimization of a 0-norm make sense.  That whole sentence should probably be rewritten.  The overall point should be that \left|x_i - c\right|^0 becomes an indicator function on the boolean expression (x_i - c) \ne 0.  Thought it's implied, the sentence doesn't make it clear that a = \left|x_i - c\right|. Davesque (talk) 01:16, 27 February 2023 (UTC)
thread_title:  Possible typo