Mittaarvona

Mittaarvona is a statistical concept found in some Estonian-language texts to describe a measure of central tendency that blends the arithmetic mean and the median. The term is formed from elements meaning “middle” and “value.” In one commonly cited definition, the mittaarvona of a finite data set X with n elements is M = (mean(X) + median(X)) / 2, where mean is the arithmetic average and median is the middle value when the data are ordered. Calculation proceeds by computing the mean and the median, then averaging them.

Basic properties: If the data are symmetrically distributed, the mean and median coincide, and mittaarvona equals that common value. For skewed data, mittaarvona lies between the mean and the median. Because it depends on the mean, it inherits sensitivity to outliers, but the influence of extreme values is moderated by the median term.

Variants and usage: Some authors explore weighted versions where M_w = w*mean + (1-w)*median for a weight w in [0,1]. Others discuss mittaarvona as a robust alternative in survey statistics where outliers affect the mean heavily. In even-sized samples, the median is the average of the two central values, and in that case the mittaarvona reflects that central tendency as well.

Example: Data: 1, 2, 3, 100. The mean is 26.5 and the median is 2.5, so mittaarvona = (26.5 + 2.5)/2 = 14.5.

See also: mean, median, robust statistics. Note: the term’s exact definition can vary by source, and mittaarvona is described here as one possible formulation used in theory and some applications.