出典(authority):フリー百科事典『ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』「2016/05/18 07:17:11」(JST)
| This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. (July 2013) (Learn how and when to remove this template message) |
In mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean (/ˌærɪθˈmɛtɪk ˈmiːn/), or simply the mean or average when the context is clear, is the sum of a collection of numbers divided by the number of numbers in the collection.[1] The collection is often a set of results of an experiment, or a set of results from a survey. The term "arithmetic mean" is preferred in some contexts in mathematics and statistics because it helps distinguish it from other means, such as the geometric mean and the harmonic mean.
In addition to mathematics and statistics, the arithmetic mean is used frequently in fields such as economics, sociology, and history, and it is used in almost every academic field to some extent. For example, per capita income is the arithmetic average income of a nation's population.
While the arithmetic mean is often used to report central tendencies, it is not a robust statistic, meaning that it is greatly influenced by outliers (values that are very much larger or smaller than most of the values). Notably, for skewed distributions, such as the distribution of income for which a few people's incomes are substantially greater than most people's, the arithmetic mean may not accord with one's notion of "middle", and robust statistics, such as the median, may be a better description of central tendency.
In a more obscure usage, any sequence of values that form an arithmetic sequence between two numbers x and y can be called "arithmetic means between x and y."[2]
The arithmetic mean (or mean or average) is the most commonly used and readily understood measure of central tendency. In statistics, the term average refers to any of the measures of central tendency. The arithmetic mean is defined as being equal to the sum of the numerical values of each and every observation divided by the total number of observations. Symbolically, if we have a data set containing the values The arithmetic mean is defined by the formula
(See summation for an explanation of the summation operator).
For example, let us consider the monthly salary of 10 employees of a firm: 2500, 2700, 2400, 2300, 2550, 2650, 2750, 2450, 2600, 2400. The arithmetic mean is
If the data set is a statistical population (i.e., consists of every possible observation and not just a subset of them), then the mean of that population is called the population mean. If the data set is a statistical sample (a subset of the population), we call the statistic resulting from this calculation a sample mean.
The arithmetic mean of a variable is often denoted by a bar, for example as in (read bar), which is the mean of the values .[3]
The arithmetic mean has several properties that make it useful, especially as a measure of central tendency. These include:
The arithmetic mean may be contrasted with the median. The median is defined such that half the values are larger than, and half are smaller than, the median. If elements in the sample data increase arithmetically, when placed in some order, then the median and arithmetic average are equal. For example, consider the data sample . The average is , as is the median. However, when we consider a sample that cannot be arranged so as to increase arithmetically, such as , the median and arithmetic average can differ significantly. In this case, the arithmetic average is 6.2 and the median is 4. In general, the average value can vary significantly from most values in the sample, and can be larger or smaller than most of them.
There are applications of this phenomenon in many fields. For example, since the 1980s, the median income in the United States has increased more slowly than the arithmetic average of income.[4]
A weighted average, or weighted mean, is an average in which some data points count more strongly than others, in that they are given more weight in the calculation. For example, the arithmetic mean of and is , or equivalently . In contrast, a weighted mean in which the first number receives, for example, twice as much weight as the second (perhaps because it is assumed to appear twice as often in the general population from which these numbers were sampled) would be calculated as . Here the weights, which necessarily sum to the value one, are and , the former being twice the latter. Note that the arithmetic mean (sometimes called the "unweighted average" or "equally weighted average") can be interpreted as a special case of a weighted average in which all the weights are equal to each other (equal to in the above example, and equal to in a situation with numbers being averaged).
When a population of numbers, and any sample of data from it, could take on any of a continuous range of numbers, instead of for example just integers, then the probability of a number falling into one range of possible values could differ from the probability of falling into a different range of possible values, even if the lengths of both ranges are the same. In such a case, the set of probabilities can be described using a continuous probability distribution. The analog of a weighted average in this context, in which there are an infinitude of possibilities for the precise value of the variable, is called the mean of the probability distribution. The most widely encountered probability distribution is called the normal distribution; it has the property that all measures of its central tendency, including not just the mean but also the aforementioned median and the mode, are equal to each other. This property does not hold however, in the cases of a great many probability distributions, such as the lognormal distribution illustrated here.
Particular care must be taken when using cyclic data, such as phases or angles. Naïvely taking the arithmetic mean of 1° and 359° yields a result of 180°. This is incorrect for two reasons:
In general application, such an oversight will lead to the average value artificially moving towards the middle of the numerical range. A solution to this problem is to use the optimization formulation (viz., define the mean as the central point: the point about which one has the lowest dispersion), and redefine the difference as a modular distance (i.e., the distance on the circle: so the modular distance between 1° and 359° is 2°, not 358°).
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||
全文を閲覧するには購読必要です。 To read the full text you will need to subscribe.
| リンク元 | 「算術平均」 |
| 関連記事 | 「mean」「means」「meaning」「arithmetic」 |