Measures of Variability: Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD)

Measures of Variability: Mean Absolute Deviation (MAD)
Introduction

The mean absolute deviation, or MAD, measures how spread out the values in a data set are around the mean. It calculates the average distance each data point is fr...

Two basketball players both average 10 points per game. Player A scores exactly 10 every time, while Player B scores 20 one game and 0 the next.

Here, their means are the same, but their consistency is very different.

To measure that consistency, we use the mean absolute deviation.

The mean is the average. A deviation is how fa...