AP Statistics 1.7: Choosing Summary Statistics

Emma is moving to a large city and is investigating typical monthly rental prices of available one-bedroom apartments. She obtained a random sample of rental prices for 50 one-bedroom apartments taken from a Web site where people voluntarily list available apartments.

The distribution of the 50 rental prices of the available apartments is shown in the following histogram.

Because Emma does not have the resources to develop the theoretical sampling distribution, she estimates the sampling distribution of the sample median using a process called bootstrapping. In the bootstrapping process, a computer program performs the following steps.

- Take a random sample, with replacement, of size 50 from the original sample.

- Calculate and record the median of the sample.

- Repeat the process to obtain a total of 15,000 medians.

Emma ran the bootstrap process, and the following frequency table is the bootstrap distribution showing her results of generating 15,000 medians.

The bootstrap distribution provides an approximation of the sampling distribution of the sample median. A confidence interval for the median can be constructed using a percentage of the values in the middle of the bootstrap distribution.

Emma wants to estimate the typical rental price of a one-bedroom apartment in the city. Based on the distribution shown, what is a disadvantage of using the mean rather than the median as an estimate of the typical rental price?