Trimmed Mean
Categories: Metrics
When your mean (average) gets a little too hairy, you grab the clippers and give it a trim.
Think we’re being facetious? Honestly, it’s a good bet to assume we were being facetious, but in this case it’s the literal truth. A trimmed mean is a mean we calculate by cutting data points off the top and/or bottom.
Outliers (values which are waaaaay larger or waaaay smaller than other data points) tend to cause a mean (or average) to be thrown off from what it should be, which is a way to tell where the middle of the data is. So if we have a data set with an outlier or two, we just snip those bad boys off the top and/or bottom and find our average from the numbers that remain.
