Statistics: mad

### Function Reference: `mad`

statistics: m = mad (x)
statistics: m = mad (x, flag)
statistics: m = mad (x, flag, `"all"`)
statistics: m = mad (x, flag, dim)
statistics: m = mad (x, flag, vecdim)

Compute the mean or median absolute deviation (MAD).

`mad (x)` returns the mean absolute deviation of the values in x. `mad` treats NaNs as missing values and removes them.

- If x is a vector, then `mad` returns the mean or median absolute deviation of the values in X.
- If x is a matrix, then `mad` returns the mean or median absolute deviation of each column of X.
- If x is an multidimensional array, then `mad (x)` operates along the first non-singleton dimension of x.

`mad (x, flag)` specifies whether to compute the mean absolute deviation (`flag = 0`, the default) or the median absolute deviation (`flag = 1`). Passing an empty variable, defaults to 0.

`mad (x, flag, `"all"`)` returns the MAD of all the elements in x.

The optional variable dim forces `mad` to operate over the specified dimension, which must be a positive integer-valued number. Specifying any singleton dimension in x, including any dimension exceeding `ndims (x)`, will result in a MAD equal to `zeros (size (x))`, while non-finite elements are returned as NaNs.

`mad (x, flag, vecdim)` returns the MAD over the dimensions specified in the vector vecdim. For example, if x is a 2-by-3-by-4 array, then `mad (x, [1 2])` returns a 1-by-1-by-4 array. Each element of the output array is the median of the elements on the corresponding page of x. If vecdim indexes all dimensions of x, then it is equivalent to `mad (x, "all")`. Any dimension in vecdim greater than `ndims (x)` is ignored.

See also: median, mean, mode

Source Code: mad