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Re:Unlearning descriptive statistics by lalaithion on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @06:02PM (#13546294)
Okay, so that leads to a very obvious (imo) question I haven't seen anyone ask:

What happens when you minimize Ln, with n > 2? Why don't we use any of those?

Re:Unlearning descriptive statistics by ssalazar on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @06:40PM (#13546576)
Increasing n gives increasing weight to outliers, to the point where L-infinity is just the single maximum value. I would guess this is less useful when attempting to understand how existing data can make conclusions about future aggregate/typical cases vs. analyzing specifically the outliers.
Re:Unlearning descriptive statistics by Sniffnoy on Wednesday February 01, 2017 @07:08PM (#13546754)
Clarification: The l-infinity norm of a vector is the maximum absolute value of its coordinates. The analogue of the median and the mean that that gets you is the midpoint of the range.