• Laticauda@lemmy.ca
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    5 months ago

    Uh in both mathematics and statistics I was taught that outliers are data points that differ significantly from the other values in a set of data by either being much larger or much smaller. I’ve never heard of it being described the way you are presenting it. Yes subtracting or adding anything to or from infinity gets you infinity, but outliers aren’t being added to or subtracted from, they’re being removed from the data set because they’re seen as skewing the data with a measurement or result that is, y’know, an outlier. One person who lives forever is not an accurate representation of the life expectancy of the average human, so they would obviously be the outlier who would be excluded from the data.