Mean absolute difference

Mean absolute difference is the average amount of difference between two or more numbers. Imagine you have some numbers, like 1, 6, and 10. The mean (average) of these numbers is 5.666... But the mean absolute difference is how much each number is different from the average if we ignore if it is smaller or larger than the average number. To calculate this, you take the difference between each number and the average, but you don’t care if the difference is positive or negative. So, the absolute differences between 1, 6, and 10 and their average of 5.666... are 4.666..., 0.666..., and 4.333.... If you add those up and divide by the total number of numbers (3), you get the mean absolute difference of approximately 3.222...