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by ivanbakel 978 days ago
For a one-sided, unbounded distribution when you still want to observe changes without being susceptible to outliers.

If you're monitoring response timings on a server, for example, the median might be very close to 0, and it won't shift unless a majority of the distribution slows down. If you take a winsorised mean, you can trim useless long response times that mess with the mean, but still see if e.g. 1/3 of your responses are suddenly slower than normal.

1 comments

But wouldn’t the trimmed mean mentioned in the article do this without “windsoriszing”?
The trimmed mean discards outliers, so it can measure "what is the typical value for non-outliers?".

The windsorized mean reduces the weight of outliers, so it can measure "how many outliers are there?" instead of "how extreme are the outliers?"