I have a huge list of times and would like to calculate an average or typical time. If I would just use the median (or other "normal" types of calculating an average), for example 23:59 and 00:01 would yield 12:00 when it should 00:00. Is there a better method?
Calculate average time
0
$\begingroup$
statistics
average
-
0My point is that you will stumble on the same problem with huge data samples, namely, these samples will be roughly evenly distributed on the unit circle. Then it is difficult to summarize the sample by anything else than a point near the center of the circle, which is meaningless because this will not be ON the circle... (Re-reading your post, I realize that even a median, whose existence you take for granted, seems difficult to define.) – 2012-01-03
1 Answers
2
I see two approaches for this. If there's some time of day when nothing happens, e.g. 4 a.m., you can let the wraparound occur at that time; for instance times from 1 a.m. to 4 a.m. would become times from 25:00 to 28:00.
If there's no such natural cutoff, you could use directional statistics; from the Wikipedia article:
Other examples of data that may be regarded as directional include statistics involving temporal periods (e.g. time of day, week, month, year, etc.), [...]
-
1Maybe the WP page linked to... – 2012-01-03