Do I use MEAN or MEDIAN when the number events will vary?

Question

I am working on a project in which I need to show progress towards completion. The project is broken in to five (5) milestones. Each milestone may have anywhere from two (2) to seven (7) sub-projects. Each sub-project may have anywhere from two (2) to ten (10) tasks. We have determined that each milestone, sub-project, and task is evenly weighted; that is the number of events for each specific task, sub-project, or milestone should not be a factor when progress is reported.

I am concerned that I present progress that reflects the actual status of my project. For example, I have three events. The MEAN is 58%, whereas the MEDIAN is 50%. Which is the right number to provide as my status?

I am almost out of characters, so I will present the problem I am working on in a seperate question.

Thank you to all the math wizzes out there for helping. I am envious of your aptitude for math!

Answer 1

Actually, I think you should use both to descibe the progress, Mean is the most useful, but knowing the median adds useful information. If the mean and median are close together (as in your example) that means you have a well-behaved distribution. But if the median is a lot different from the mean, that means that one or more elements are abnormal, and that some projects are not progressing normally.

Answer 2

Mean is same as average.
Median is synonymous to middle or center.
Both mean and median are measures of dispersion for a particular subject.

Since the project is broken into 5 milestones, I believe that the term mean progress is more suitable. Take the sum of the progress percentage for each milestone and then calculate for the mean. This will reflect the overall progress of all the projects.

On the other hand, median will only identify which among the 5 milestones is at the middle. It will not reflect the actual progress but merely stating that you are working with it (the median among 5) not too fast but not too slow.

Example:

1st: 40% done
2nd: 50% done
3rd: 65% done
4th: 70% done
5th: 90% done

from the above data, you could say that your project is 63% finished. Median will be 65% which does not indicate the actual overall progress.

Answer 3

For a set of five whole numbers, the mean is 4, the mode is 1, and the median is 5. What are the five numbers?


Solution
As the mode is 1, there must be at least two 1's.

But because the median is 5, the third number must be 5, and so we have the set of numbers {1, 1, 5, x, y}.

If the mean is 4, the sum of the numbers must be 45 = 20; that is, 1 + 1 + 5 + x + y = 20 x + y = 13.

Without loss of generality (WLOG), let x y, and if x = y, we get x + x = 13, 2x = 13, x = 6.5. Clearly x 5, and so 5 x 6.5

However, if x = 5, we would have two modal values: 1 and 5. Hence we deduce that x = 6, y = 7, and the set of five numbers must be {1, 1, 5, 6, 7}.

To recap:

Mode = Most of a particular number
Median = Middle number of a set
Mean = Average of all the numbers

Answer 4

The answer you are looking for is The mean is the average of all the numbers added up then divided. The median is the middle of the line between a single value in the middle of an assorted distribution or the average of two values closest to the middle. It is retained with the weight of 1. all other values are valued at 0.

Answer 5

What is the word problem?
MEAN means the average of all of the numbers whereas MEDIAN is number of times of the same number.
I am giving an educated guess you would more likely to use mean to find what is the average of the milestones.
MEDIAN is an example of number of students in class that scored 85 point. So there could 15 students out of thirty with that score and so on.

Answer 6

Typically, people use mean, because the status should be the average, not the most common number. But if you have any outliers (numbers that skew from the range of the other numbers), then median is better.

But seeing as your mean is 58%, I'd go with that.

Hope this helps.

Answer 7

Median

Answer 8

Median

Answer 9

Mean is the better choice as it shows the average of your results and not the extremes

Answer 10

Mean - the average of all numbers.