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The average deviation, also known as mean deviation, is a statistical measure used to evaluate the dispersion of a set of data. It represents the average of the absolute differences between each data point and either the mean or median of the dataset. This value provides insight into the variability within the data, indicating how spread out the numbers are from a central point. It is one of several statistical methods used to quantify the random error in measurements, alongside standard deviation and variance.12

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