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Arithmetic Mean
If
are real numbers, their arithmetic mean is defined as
The arithmetic mean is what is commonly called the average of the numbers. The value of
is always between the least and the greatest of the numbers
.
A generalization of this concept is that of weighted mean, also known as
weighted average. Let
be numbers whose sum
is not zero,
which will be known as weights. (Typically, these will be strictly
positive
numbers, so their sum will automatically differ from zero.) Then the
weighted mean of
is defined to be