Finding the median of a dataset becomes increasingly time-consuming as the size of your dataset increases — imagine finding the median of an unsorted dataset with 10,000 observations.

The R median() function can do the work of sorting, then finding the median for you. In the example below, we use median() to calculate the median of a dataset with ten values:

example_data = c(24, 16, 30, 10, 12, 28, 38, 2, 4, 36, 42)

example_median = median(example_data)

print(example_median)

The code above prints the median of the dataset, 24. The mean of this dataset is 22. It’s worth noting these two values are close to one another, but not equal.