Credit-Card Debt Nears $1 Trillion as Banks Push Plastic

Re:Credit-Card Debt Nears $1 Trillion as Banks Push Plastic by gnaritas on Friday May 20, 2016 @04:15PM (#11741121)

Incorrect, median, mean, and mode are all types of averages. Usually when people say average they mean the mean, but they're all different kinds of averages trying to identify the central tendency.

"Average: a number expressing the central or typical value in a set of data, in particular the mode, median, or (most commonly) the mean, which is calculated by dividing the sum of the values in the set by their number." -- Google

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Re:Credit-Card Debt Nears $1 Trillion as Banks Push Plastic by dragonwriter on Friday May 20, 2016 @04:20PM (#11741146)

> Incorrect, median, mean, and mode are all types of averages.

There's a bunch of means (arithmetic, geometric, and harmonic, for instance), and they are all (as well as median and mode) averages.

Though, usually when people say "mean" without further specifics they mean the "arithmetic mean", and usually when they say "average" without further specifics they also mean "arithmetic mean" (though "median" is also fairly common, and "mode" isn't that uncommon.)

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