TODAY’S DATA LENS
One outlier moved the mean. The median stayed put.
Observation
Start with 1, 2, 3, 4, 5: the mean and median are both 3. Replace only the 5 with 50 and the median is still 3, while the mean jumps to 12. The median’s resistance to outliers makes it useful when extreme values would otherwise pull the arithmetic mean away from the middle of most observations.
One number ran away. Only one average chased it.