What does the median represent in a data set?

The median represents the middle value of an ordered set of data. In a given data set, to find the median, you first arrange the values in ascending order. If there is an odd number of values, the median is the value located right in the middle. If the number of values is even, the median is calculated by averaging the two middle values. This measure is particularly useful because it effectively divides the data set into two equal halves, providing a central point that is not skewed by extreme values, unlike the mean.

Understanding the concept of the median is essential, as it plays a crucial role in statistical analysis, especially in fields that deal with distributions that might contain outliers or non-normally distributed data. Other measures such as the mode, which indicates the most frequently occurring value, and the mean, which is the average of all observations, cannot accurately reflect the typical value in skewed distributions like the median does.