While teaching measures of central tendency in Intro stats, I have shrugged and said: "Yeah, mean and average are the same thing, I don't know why there are two words. Statisticians say mean so we'll say mean in this class." I now have a better explanation than that non-explanation, as verbalized by this podcast: The average is thrown around colloquially and can refer to mode, while mean can always be defined with a formula.
This is a fun podcast that describes mode vs. mean, but it also describes the research the rabbit hole we sometimes go down when a seemingly straightforward question becomes downright intractable. Here, the question is: What is the modal American? The Planet Money Team, with the help of FiveThirtyEight's Ben Castlemen, eventually had to go non-parametric and divide people into broad categories and figure out which category had the biggest N. Here is the description of how they divided up :
And, like, they had SO MANY CELLS in their design. JUST SO MANY. For each response option, there were categorical responses:
How to use in class:
1. Podcasts - I know some of you use these in class, here is one for stats.
2. Categorical vs. continuous variables and when and why you would use them. Here, a continuous variable, income, was divided into categorical brackets because they were looking at the data in a non-parametric manner.
Special thanks to Michael Proulx (@MicahelProulx) for recommending this episode.
This is a fun podcast that describes mode vs. mean, but it also describes the research the rabbit hole we sometimes go down when a seemingly straightforward question becomes downright intractable. Here, the question is: What is the modal American? The Planet Money Team, with the help of FiveThirtyEight's Ben Castlemen, eventually had to go non-parametric and divide people into broad categories and figure out which category had the biggest N. Here is the description of how they divided up :
And, like, they had SO MANY CELLS in their design. JUST SO MANY. For each response option, there were categorical responses:
How to use in class:
1. Podcasts - I know some of you use these in class, here is one for stats.
2. Categorical vs. continuous variables and when and why you would use them. Here, a continuous variable, income, was divided into categorical brackets because they were looking at the data in a non-parametric manner.
3. Which THEN allows you to discuss non-parametric tests, like this one. They weren't exactly doing a chi-square, right? But they were thinking like a chi-square. They just wanted to figure out which of their buckets contained the most Americans...however, they used non-parametric logic. And that logic for non-parametric, where you have groups, and not the general linear model, working in the background, IS challenging for a novice to understand.
Special thanks to Michael Proulx (@MicahelProulx) for recommending this episode.
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