Locality

The term locality has different meanings in different disciplines:

Table of contents

1 Geography 2 Computer Science 3 Statistics

Geography

In geography, a locality is a place. This is the primary meaning of the term, from which other uses derive.

Specifically, the term "locality" is used by the United States Board on Geographic Names to refer to the name of a place that is neither a legally incorporated or defined entity (like a township or city), nor a specific geographical feature such as a river or mountain.

Computer Science

In computer science, locality generally refers to locality of reference, which describes how programs typically access data.

Statistics

In statistics, locality is used to mean the central tendency of a given data set. Thus the mean and median are measures of locality. This usage originates in exploratory data analysis.

While conventional measures of locality, such as arithmetic mean or geometric mean, are often seen as the most straightforward way to describe locality, they are very sensitive to outliers. Thus the median value, which does not have any dependence on extreme outliers, is frequently used instead when the data set is relatively large.