Harmonic mean
Harmonic mean is a type of average. It is used for problems where you want to find an average of a bunch of numbers, but some of the numbers are really big or really small. It works like this:
Imagine you have 6 numbers: 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50. If you want to find the average, you can add all the numbers together and divide by 6. That would give you an average of 15.
But what if the number 50 is really big, compared to all the other numbers? The average of 15 isn't the best way to show all the numbers. That's when you use the harmonic mean.
To use the harmonic mean, you first have to divide 1 by each number. So for our numbers, that would give us 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/10, 1/20, and 1/50. Then, you add all these numbers together and divide by 6 (the amount of numbers). That would give us an answer of 0.018. To make it easier to understand, you can multiply this answer by 100 and you have your answer!
So in the example with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50, if we used the harmonic mean, our average would be 1.8. This average is a lot closer to the real numbers (2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50) than the average of 15 we got using regular average.
Imagine you have 6 numbers: 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50. If you want to find the average, you can add all the numbers together and divide by 6. That would give you an average of 15.
But what if the number 50 is really big, compared to all the other numbers? The average of 15 isn't the best way to show all the numbers. That's when you use the harmonic mean.
To use the harmonic mean, you first have to divide 1 by each number. So for our numbers, that would give us 1/2, 1/4, 1/8, 1/10, 1/20, and 1/50. Then, you add all these numbers together and divide by 6 (the amount of numbers). That would give us an answer of 0.018. To make it easier to understand, you can multiply this answer by 100 and you have your answer!
So in the example with the numbers 2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50, if we used the harmonic mean, our average would be 1.8. This average is a lot closer to the real numbers (2, 4, 8, 10, 20, and 50) than the average of 15 we got using regular average.
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