Background: Measures of central tendency are one of the foundational concepts of statistics, with the most commonly used measures being mean, median, and mode. While these are all very simple to calculate when data conform to a unimodal symmetric distribution, either discrete or continuous, measures of central tendency are more challenging to calculate for data distributed asymmetrically. There is a gap in the current statistical literature on computing median and mode for most skewed unimodal continuous distributions. For example, for a standardized normal distribution, mean, median, and mode are all equal to 0. The mean, median, and mode are all equal to each other. For a more general normal distribution, the mode and median are still equal to the mean. Unfortunately, the mean is highly affected by extreme values. If the distribution is skewed either positively or negatively, the mean is pulled in the direction of the skew; however, the median and mode are more robust statistics and are not pulled as far as the mean. The traditional response is to provide an estimate of the median and mode as current methodological approaches are limited in determining their exact value once the mean is pulled away. Methods: The purpose of this study is to test a new statistical method, utilizing the first order and second order partial derivatives in Taylor series expansion, for approximating the median and mode of skewed unimodal continuous distributions. Specifically, to compute the approximated mode, the first order derivatives of the sum of the first three terms in the Taylor series expansion is set to zero and then the equation is solved to find the unknown. To compute the approximated median, the integration from negative infinity to the median is set to be one half and then the equation is solved for the median. Finally, to evaluate the accuracy of our derived formulae for computing the mode and median of the skewed unimodal continuous distributions, simulation study will be conducted with respect to skew normal distributions, skew t-distributions, skew exponential distributions, and others, with various parameters. Conclusions: The potential of this study may have a great impact on the advancement of current central tendency measurement, the gold standard used in public health and social science research. The study may answer an important question concerning the precision of median and mode estimates for skewed unimodal continuous distributions of data. If this method proves to be an accurate approximation of the median and mode, then it should become the method of choice when measures of central tendency are required.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:ETSU/oai:dc.etsu.edu:etsu-works-1112 |
| Date | 06 April 2016 |
| Creators | Dula, Mark, Mogusu, Eunice, Strasser, Sheryl, Liu, Ying, Zheng, Shimin |
| Publisher | Digital Commons @ East Tennessee State University |
| Source Sets | East Tennessee State University |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | text |
| Source | ETSU Faculty Works |
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