On Tue, 5 Jul 2016 11:35:30 +0200 Victor Stinner <victor.stinner@gmail.com> wrote:
It looks like median helps to reduce the effect of outliers.
If you want to reduce the effect the outliers, you can just remove them: for example, ignore the 5% shortest samples and the 5% longest ones.
The median will not only reduce the effect of outliers but also completely ignore the value of most samples *except* the median sample.
In practice, it almost never occurs to have all samples with the same value. There is always a statistic distribution, usually as a gaussian curse.
If it's a gaussian curve (not a curse, probably :-)), then you can summarize it with two values: the mean and the stddev. But it's probably not a gaussian, because of system noise and other factors, so your assumption is wrong :-)
Regards
Antoine.