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mdickinson merged 1 commit into from
Dec 21, 2021
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bpo-23522: Update potentially confusing note for mean #30174

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9 changes: 5 additions & 4 deletions Doc/library/statistics.rst
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Expand Up @@ -116,10 +116,11 @@ However, for reading convenience, most of the examples show sorted sequences.

.. note::

The mean is strongly affected by outliers and is not a robust estimator
for central location: the mean is not necessarily a typical example of
the data points. For more robust measures of central location, see
:func:`median` and :func:`mode`.
The mean is strongly affected by `outliers
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outlier>`_ and is not necessarily a
typical example of the data points. For a more robust, although less
efficient, measure of `central tendency
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_tendency>`_, see :func:`median`.

The sample mean gives an unbiased estimate of the true population mean,
so that when taken on average over all the possible samples,
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