'There's a huge misconception that if someone sneezes a lot then they must have hay fever,' says Dr Adrian Morris of the Surrey Allergy Clinic. From dogs to dust mites and pollen to latex, it's thought that 40 per cent of us suffer from an allergy.
The mean absolute deviation is the average of the positive distances of each point from the mean. The larger the MAD, the greater variability there is in the data (the data is more spread out). The MAD helps determine whether the set's mean is a useful indicator of the values within the set.
1. mean deviation-the arithmetic mean of the absolute values of deviations from the mean of a distribution. mean deviation from the mean. statistics-a branch of applied mathematics concerned with the collection and interpretation of quantitative data and the use of probability theory to estimate population parameters.