3.11:
Midrange
The midrange is one of the measures of central tendency. It is the value midway between the two extreme values and is typically defined as the arithmetic mean of the maximum and minimum data values.
In this sample dataset of the sleep time of infants, the midrange can be calculated by adding the maximum and minimum hours and dividing the sum by two.
Although the midrange is relatively easy to compute, it is rarely used in statistics as it ignores all intermediate data values and lacks robustness in measurement.
The midrange is also sensitive to extreme values. In this example, a change in the maximum or minimum hours of sleep can alter the midrange. Besides, the midrange cannot be used for categorical data such as ranks or labels.
The midrange is complementary to the range or the difference between the maximum and minimum values. For instance, by knowing the midrange value and the data range, one can compute the maximum and minimum values in this dataset.
3.11:
Midrange
A somewhat easy to compute quantitative estimate of a data set’s central tendency is its midrange, which is defined as the mean of the minimum and maximum values of an ordered data set.
Simply put, the midrange is half of the data set’s range. Similar to the mean, the midrange is sensitive to the extreme values and hence the prospective outliers. However, unlike the mean, the midrange is not sensitive to all the values of the data set that lie in the middle. Thus, it is prone to outliers and does not accurately represent the central tendency of the data set.
Due to these disadvantages, the midrange is not used much. Nonetheless, in a relatively fluctuation-free data set, it can be easily calculated to obtain a quick estimate of the central tendency.