While you’ve shown that you can calculate the average yourself, it becomes time-consuming as the size of your dataset increases — imagine adding all of the numbers in a dataset with 10,000 observations.

The R mean() function can do the work of adding and dividing for you. In the example below, we use mean() to calculate the average of a dataset with ten values:

example_data <- c(24, 16, 30, 10, 12, 28, 38, 2, 4, 36)

example_average <- mean(example_data)

print(example_average)

The code above calculates the average of example_data and saves the value to example_average. The resulting average of this array is 20.