Database Reference
In-Depth Information
Figure 6-13. Box plot of player salary by team
Notice how the mean (the dots colored red) don't even fall within the interquartile range for
the three teams at the top of the chart. It's no coincidence that these are the teams with the
three highest paid players in the league. The presence of these outliers “pulled” the mean to
the right. I'm sure the players on the New York team wouldn't agree if you told them the
“typical” player salary was $518K.
Summary
In this chapter, we covered measures of central tendency—mean, median, and mode—and
how to visualize these values for different types of distributions. We also touched on how the
notion of “average” can be problematic in communicating data. To recap: blindly using the
mean can be dangerous. It conveys a notion of “typical” when it may not be typical at all, de-
pending on the distribution of the data. This is important to remember when communicating
measures of central tendency.
Does knowing this make the task a little more difficult? Yes, but we wouldn't want to make
it simpler than it is, would we?
