Mean Median Mode
Mean, median, and mode summarise different aspects of a sample. Choose the statistic from the question instead of calling them interchangeable averages.
Understand the idea
The mean uses every value, the median describes the middle of an ordered sample, and modes describe the most frequent values. An outlier can move the mean strongly while leaving the median almost unchanged. Several values can tie for highest frequency, so multimode is explicit about that possibility.
Where to try it
Open this example with Try in playground. The code loads as editable text and does not run until you select Run. The first run downloads Python. Each run starts fresh; temporary files created by a script are not files on your PC.
A worked example
from statistics import mean, median, multimode
durations = [10, 12, 12, 14, 52]
print(mean(durations))
print(median(durations))
print(multimode(durations))
Read the result
The mean is 20, the median is 12, and the mode list is [12]. The long 52-minute task affects the summaries differently.
Try one change
Remove the outlier and compare all three summaries.
For package options, see the scikit-learn documentation.