Important: The stats package has been deprecated. Use the superseding package Statistics instead.

The function median of the subpackage stats[describe, ...] finds the item in data that correspond to the median.

The median of a sorted list of numbers is either the middle value or the arithmetic mean of the two middle values. If the requested median falls between entries, it is interpolated.

The median is a measure of central tendency. The description for the mean provides more information about such measures. The median is used to find a typical value of the given data when the extreme values are not representative of the rest of the data. It corresponds to the 50th percentile of the data.

Missing data are ignored.

For information about the parameter gap, see describe[gaps].

The data must be numeric.

The command with(stats[describe],median) allows the use of the abbreviated form of this command.

$\mathrm{with}\left(\mathrm{stats}\right)\:$

$\mathrm{describe}\left[\mathrm{median}\right]\left(\left[1\,2\,3\,4\,250\right]\right)$

$3$

$\mathrm{describe}\left[\mathrm{mean}\right]\left(\left[1\,2\,3\,4\,250\right]\right)$

$52$

$\mathrm{describe}\left[\mathrm{median}\right]\left(\left[1\,2\,3\,4\right]\right)$

$\frac{5}{2}$

$\frac{2+3}{2}$

$\frac{5}{2}$