<story><title>Averages Can Be Misleading: Try a Percentile (2014)</title><url>https://www.elastic.co/blog/averages-can-dangerous-use-percentile</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baq</author><text>IMHO plotting the distribution should be the first step before trying to compute its statistics. If you know the shape, you can understand the values - otherwise it&amp;#x27;s guesswork.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>jmngomes</author><text>Agreed, this is actually demonstrated by Anscombe&amp;#x27;s quartet, a set of &amp;quot;four datasets that have nearly identical simple descriptive statistics, yet appear very different when graphed&amp;quot; (&lt;a href=&quot;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Anscombe%27s_quartet&quot; rel=&quot;nofollow&quot;&gt;https:&amp;#x2F;&amp;#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&amp;#x2F;wiki&amp;#x2F;Anscombe%27s_quartet&lt;/a&gt;)</text></comment>
<story><title>Averages Can Be Misleading: Try a Percentile (2014)</title><url>https://www.elastic.co/blog/averages-can-dangerous-use-percentile</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>baq</author><text>IMHO plotting the distribution should be the first step before trying to compute its statistics. If you know the shape, you can understand the values - otherwise it&amp;#x27;s guesswork.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>shittyadmin</author><text>We&amp;#x27;ve switched to box and whisker plots for most of our statistical reports, they give you a good idea for various important percentiles and adding average indicators is fairly simple if desired. Even for things like latency this can be quite useful.</text></comment>