The Ninther — Approximating Medians

Andy Greatorex
2 min readMar 23, 2017

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The main benefit of using the median as oppose to other average approximation aggregates like the mean, is because it is less skewed by extremely large or small values. It offers a better approximation of what is called a typical value of the data.

To estimate the median of a dataset, you must read all the elements into memory, sort them and then find the middle value; a process which is inefficient…

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Andy Greatorex

London based data scientist @Revolut. Formerly in NYC @Barclays. Building stuff for the fun of it.