More than one mean however for the most part there is just one

I am always looking for new things to learn, and write about, in the process of doing so I have decided to write a few posts on statistics. From what I have gathered data science is getting pretty hot these days, and companies can not seem to find enough people, so I started looking into what I need to know to start going in that direction. Turns out there is a lot to know in order to hack it as a data scientist, a whole lot of heavy math is involved, but I am down for giving it a try at least.

This is what has lead me to reading a whole bunch of wikipedia articles the relate to the subject of statistics, one of which is the article on what a mean is as even when it comes to that it turns out that there is more than one.

Arithmetic mean

So it turns out that what it is that I have always considered the one and only mean is actually more accurately called the Arithmetic mean. This is of course what you get when you add up a bunch of numbers, and divide by the number of numbers.

let data = [1,2,3,4];
 
let mean = data.reduce(function(acc,n){
 
   return acc + n;
 
}) / data.length;
 
console.log(mean); // 2.5

This is still what is used most often, and is in fact generally what a mean is, however there is also geometric mean as well.

Geometric mean

There is adding up all the numbers in a data set, and then there is multiplying all of them, which of course can result in a munch larger number compared to the sum that is a result of finding an arithmetic mean called a product. This product is then not divided, but nRoot is used instead to find a geometric mean.

let data = [1,2,3,4];
 
let mean = Math.pow(data.reduce(function(acc,n){
 
   return acc * n;
 
}),1 / data.length);
 
console.log(mean); // 2.21336

Conclusion

There is also Harmonic mean, but I have not looked into that one just yet.