In statistics, what is the average of a set of values called?

The average of a set of values is referred to as the mean. The mean is calculated by summing all of the individual values in the dataset and then dividing that total by the number of values. This measure provides a central value that represents the data as a whole, making it a widely used statistic for understanding the overall trend in the dataset.

While the mode is the value that appears most frequently in a set, and the median represents the middle value when the data is organized in ascending or descending order, both of these do not give a direct average of the values. Variance, on the other hand, measures how much the values in a dataset differ from the mean, but it does not represent an average itself. Thus, the mean is the term that accurately describes the average of a set of values.