Mediana

Mediana is a statistical measure that represents the middle value of a dataset. More formally, it is the value separating the higher half from the lower half of a sorted data sample, a population, or a probability distribution.

To find the median:

1. Sort the dataset in ascending or descending order.
2. If the number of data points is odd, the median is the middle value.
3. If the number of data points is even, the median is the arithmetic mean (average) of the two middle values.

The median is a measure of central tendency that is less sensitive to outliers than the mean. This makes it a useful statistic for describing data with extreme values. For example, the median income is often used to describe the typical income of a population, as it is not as affected by very high earners as the mean income would be.

The median can be calculated for both discrete and continuous data. It is also applicable to ordinal data, where the values have a meaningful order but the intervals between them are not necessarily equal.

In probability theory and statistics, the median of a probability distribution is the value such that a random variable from that distribution is equally likely to be less than or greater than the median. It is the value at which the cumulative distribution function equals 0.5.

Compared to the mean, the median provides a robust measure of central tendency, particularly in the presence of skewed distributions or outliers. Other related concepts include the mode (the most frequently occurring value) and quartiles (values that divide the sorted data into four equal parts).