Which statement correctly describes the behavior of mean imputation on a dataset with significant outliers?

Question

Data Science — Medium

Which statement correctly describes the behavior of mean imputation on a dataset with significant outliers?

Accepted Answer

Mean imputation replaces missing values with the average of the observed data. Because the mean is sensitive to outliers, it does not accurately represent the distribution, and replacing missing values with a single constant value artificially reduces the variance of the dataset. Median imputation is generally preferred when outliers are present because the median is a more robust measure of central tendency.