Locality (statistics)

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In statistics, locality is central tendency of a data set. More frequently, the word location is used. Thus the mean and median are measures of locality. This usage is frequent in exploratory data analysis.

The word location also denotes a parameter that parametrizes a family of probability distributions in a shift-equivariant way.

While conventional measures of locality, such as arithmetic mean are often seen as the most straightforward way to describe locality, they are very sensitive to outliers. Thus the median value, which does not have any dependence on extreme outliers, is frequently used instead when the data set is relatively large.