Locality

In computer science, locality generally refers to locality of reference, which describes how programs typically access data.

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In statistics, mean and median are measures of the locality of a given data set. The term originates in exploratory data analysis.

While conventional measures of locality, such as arithmetic mean or geometric mean, are often seen as the most straightforward way to describe locality, they are very sensitive to outliers. Thus the median value, which does not have any dependence on extreme outliers, is frequently used instead when the data set is relatively large.