[TowerTalk] FW: more accurate statistically

W5GN w5gn at mxg.com
Tue Aug 11 07:57:56 EDT 2015


The average human has one tit and one ball.

So much for an average being a useful descriptive metric

I concur TOTALLY on percentile (median) metrics. 
It's what REAL Operating Systems on REAL computers 
(z/OS on IBM z/13 MainFrames) use for resource management.
We tell z/OS we want 95 % of tranactions in 1 second, for
a particular class of work, as the goal, and z/OS manages
resources (moving real memory and/or real engines) to 
meet that goal.

And no matter HOW LARGE a sample set, a bimodal distribution
can still have an average value that is not a value in the
sample set.

73

Barry, W5GN


Herbert W. "Barry" Merrill, PhD
President-Programmer
MXG Software
Merrill Consultants
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-----Original Message-----
From: TowerTalk [mailto:towertalk-bounces at contesting.com] On Behalf Of
kr2q at optimum.net
Sent: Monday, August 10, 2015 6:04 AM
To: towertalk at contesting.com
Cc: towertalk at contesting.com
Subject: Re: [TowerTalk] more accurate statistically

K8RI replied:
[snip]
That is true for small samples, but not those large enough to be
statistically significant.
The larger the sample, the more accurate statistically. 
[end snip]

Roger:
This (above) is a totally different statement from what you originally
stated and to which I commented.  

I don't care how big the sample population is, the fact is that the mean
(average) will always be more sensitive to outlier data when compared to
applying the median to the same set of data.

Determining which measure of central tendency is "more accurate" or "more
meaningful," for whatever you may want to learn about, is a completely
different topic.

de Doug KR2Q
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