Functions > Statistics > Descriptive Statistics > Mean Functions
  
Mean Functions
mean(A, B, C, ...)—Returns the arithmetic mean, or average, of A, B, C, ..., by summing all elements in the arguments and dividing by the total number of elements.
The arithmetic mean for N number of elements is defined as follows:
The arithmetic mean for an m x n array is defined as follows:
gmean(A, B, C, ...)—Returns the geometric mean of A, B, C, ....
The geometric mean for N number of elements is defined as follows:
The geometric mean for an m x n array is defined as follows:
The geometric mean is useful for calculating growth rates.
hmean(A, B, C, ...)—Returns the harmonic mean of A, B, C, ....
The harmonic mean for N number of elements is defined as follows:
The harmonic mean for an m x n array is defined as follows:
The harmonic mean is the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean of the reciprocals.
Arguments
A, B, C, ... are scalars or m x n arrays.
Function mean accepts complex and negative values, while gmean and hmean accept only positive real numbers.
Additional Information
The values returned by the three functions have this relationship:
hmean(A, B, C, ...) < gmean(A, B, C, ...) < mean(A, B, C, ...)