One of the most essential objectives of statistical analysis is to get one single value that describes the characteristic of the whole mass of unwieldy data. Such a value is known as  the central value or an average or the expected value of the variable. The word average is  generally used in day-to-day conversation. For e.g., we often talk of average boy in a class,  average income, average height or life of an Indian  etc. whenever  we say he is an average student what it means is that he is neither very good nor very bad, just a mediocre type of student. However, in statistics the word average has a different meaning.

The word average has been specified differently:

"The word Average is an attempt to find out one single figure to describe whole of figures."

" An average is a single value selected from a group of values to represent them in some way-a value which is supposed to stand for entire  group, of which it is a part, as typical of all the values in the group "

"An average is a typical value in the sense that it is sometimes employed to show all the individual values in a series or of a variable"

"The average is sometimes described as a number which is typical for the entire  group"

"An average value is a single value within the range of the data which  is used to represent all of the values in the series. Since an average is somewhere within the range of the data, it is also known  as the  measure of central value."

Some of its important topics are shown below  :

1. Arithmetic mean
2. Arithmetic mean open end classes
3. Averaging objectives
4. Geometric mean-continuous series
5. Harmonic mean-continuous series
6. Mode calculation
7. Compound interest formula
8. Median-discrete series
9. Quartiles computation
10.Harmonic mean
11.Median-mathematical property
12.Median
13.Mode
14.Averages relationship
15.Weighted geometric mean
16.Weighted harmonic mean

Browse Important topics or keywords of Central Value Measures  below: