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Use of the Mean
Rationale
–Scientific
relevance
•Measure of “central
tendency” or “location”
•Related to totals,
e.g. total health care costs
–Plausibility that it
would differ across groups
•Sensitive to many
patterns of differences in distributions (especially in tails of
distributions)
–Statistical
properties
•Distributional theory
known
•Optimal (most precise)
for many distributions
•(Ease of
interpretation?)