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In some circumstances, mathematicians may calculate a mean of an infinite (or even an uncountable) set of values. This can happen when calculating the mean value of a function (). Intuitively, a mean of a function can be thought of as calculating the area under a section of a curve, and then dividing by the length of that section.
The point () is called the mean value of () on [,]. So we write f ¯ = f ( c ) {\displaystyle {\bar {f}}=f(c)} and rearrange the preceding equation to get the above definition. In several variables, the mean over a relatively compact domain U in a Euclidean space is defined by
The arithmetic mean can be similarly defined for vectors in multiple dimensions, not only scalar values; this is often referred to as a centroid. More generally, because the arithmetic mean is a convex combination (meaning its coefficients sum to ), it can be defined on a convex space, not only a vector space.
Average of chords. In ordinary language, an average is a single number or value that best represents a set of data. The type of average taken as most typically representative of a list of numbers is the arithmetic mean – the sum of the numbers divided by how many numbers are in the list.
Smoothing of a noisy sine (blue curve) with a moving average (red curve). In statistics, a moving average (rolling average or running average or moving mean [1] or rolling mean) is a calculation to analyze data points by creating a series of averages of different selections of the full data set.
The geometric mean is also used to calculate B and C series paper formats. The B n {\displaystyle B_{n}} format has an area which is the geometric mean of the areas of A n {\displaystyle A_{n}} and A n − 1 {\displaystyle A_{n-1}} .
A simple way to calculate the mean of a series of angles (in the interval [0°, 360°)) is to calculate the mean of the cosines and sines of each angle, and obtain the angle by calculating the inverse tangent. Consider the following three angles as an example: 10, 20, and 30 degrees.
The arithmetic mean of a population, or population mean, is often denoted μ. [2] The sample mean ¯ (the arithmetic mean of a sample of values drawn from the population) makes a good estimator of the population mean, as its expected value is equal to the population mean (that is, it is an unbiased estimator).