Interpreting the Mean and Median: Apply It 1

  • Name the features of the distribution of a data set using statistical language
  • Describe the connection between the distribution of a data set and its mean and median

Is It Worth It?

Consider this scenario: A college basketball player is skilled enough to make an NBA roster and is thinking about dropping out of college this year.

Image of a stack of bills, money.
Figure 1. Big financial opportunities can be appealing—but is it worth giving up a college education?

To better understand the scenario and to be able to have a convincing argument, let’s explore the distribution of professional basketball salaries. Let’s use a data set to see how outliers influence different measures of center and how averages can be misleading.

Take a moment to recall the meanings of the terms left-skewed, right-skewed, symmetric, and outlier. You’ll need to be able to use those terms to describe features of a data set.

Let’s explore the data set and boxplot of NBA salaries[1] for Texas players in the 2017 – 2018 season.

  1.  NBA player salary data set (2017-2018). (2018) Kaggle. Retrieved from https://www.kaggle.com/koki25ando/salary ↵