Question

I made a distribution of 15 apartment rents in my neighborhood. One apartment had a higher rent than all the others, and this outlier caused the mean rent to be higher than the median rent. Does this make sense because the outlier with a large value increases the mean, but does not affect the median?

Answer 1

Yes this makes sense

Explanation:

When their is one outlier it makes the average spike which can present misleading data while with median the outlier is left relatively unaffected.

Answer 2

Yes this makes sense.

Explanation:

The given dataset consists of 15 apartment rents. A data value which is an outlier (much larger than the rest) will increase the overall mean value of the population but it may not affect the median. Let us take an example of 15 sample rent value in ascending order,

100,120,130,140,150,170,175,185,190,200,220,250,280,290,1000

Here , mean rent will become high due to the single high rent datapoint(1000) but the median won't be impacted.