Harmonic Average
Categories: Metrics
The harmonic average (or, to be more mathematically precise, the harmonic mean) is a Pythagorean mean, and is the reciprocal of the arithmetic mean, if you’re familiar with that one. Hint: you are...it's just where you add up all the numbers and divide by the number of numbers, i.e. the arithmetic mean of 1, 2, and 3 is 2.
For that same example, you'd just flip the top and bottom with each other. In our example, we'd get around 1.63 (3 / (1 + ½ + ⅓) = 1.63-ish).
The harmonic average is useful for when you want to average rates, like miles per hour.