Central Tendency

In statistics, the term central tendency relates to the way in which quantitative data tend to cluster around some value. A measure of central tendency is any of a number of ways of specifying this "central value". In practical statistical analysis, the terms are often used before one has chosen even a preliminary form of analysis: thus an initial objective might be to "choose an appropriate measure of central tendency".

In the simplest cases, the measure of central tendency is an average of a set of measurements, the word average being variously construed as mean, median, or other measure of location, depending on the context. However, the term is applied to multidimensional data as well as to univariate data and in situations where a transformation of the data values for some or all dimensions would usually be considered necessary: in the latter cases, the notion of a "central location" is retained in converting an "average" computed for the transformed data back to the original units. In addition, there are several different kinds of calculations for central tendency, where the kind of calculation depends on the type of data (level of measurement).

Both "central tendency" and "measure of central tendency" apply to either statistical populations or to samples from a population.