harmonic mean
1
7.5
- noun
- /hɑːrˈmɒnɪk miːn/
- Specialized
:
media armónica
- In statistics, the harmonic mean is particularly useful when dealing with ratios and rates.
Examples
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Essentially, the harmonic mean of a list always tends towards the lowest elements of the list.
Blog text (21) -
If a single bin has a zero as its value, the harmonic mean of the values in the bins will be zero.
Blog text (21) -
A quick look at the harmonic mean shows why this occurs.
Blog text (21) -
Global efficiency, the harmonic mean of the minimum path length between each pair of nodes, is an alternative measure of connectivity of the network.
Blog text (4) -
In this analysis, missing data was replaced with harmonic means (6.9% participants with missing data).
Academic text (2001) -
As shown in Table 7, we confirmed that the harmonic mean of the proposed method was statistically higher than those of comparative methods 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, and 8 at the 5% level.
Academic text (2016) -
When we focus on the harmonic mean of each position's classifier in Table 6, there is an average difference of 3.3% between the proposed method and comparative method 6.
Academic text (2016) -
The Hubble telescope (which had a prime mission of settling this issue) produced a number which, ironically, was pretty close to the harmonic mean of 50 and 100, with a much smaller error.
Blog text (27) -
As shown in Fig. 2(a), the proposed method outperforms the comparative methods, and as shown in Table 5, sensitivity, harmonic mean, and AUC of the proposed method are higher than those of comparative methods 1-5.
Academic text (2016) -
The harmonic mean is often used in finance to average rates of return on investments.
Surface Forms
Morphology
The headword 'mean' clearly signals that this is a type of average, so a B1 learner who knows both words will likely infer it is a particular kind of average. However, 'harmonic' is a technical modifier whose relation to the specific reciprocal-based calculation is not predictable from its surface meaning, so the exact mathematical procedure would remain opaque without prior exposure.
Etymology
Harmonic mean The term harmonic mean comes from old music ideas: musicians noticed that tones fit simple number ratios, so the word harmonic points to these 'harmonies' of notes. This mean averages the 'one over' values. You flip each number and that matches how fast strings or sounds vibrate, so it gives the right middle value for rates and ratios.