Caveats of using the median absolute deviation

The median absolute deviation is a measure of dispersion which can be used as a robust alternative to the standard deviation. It works great for slight deviations from normality (e.g., for contaminated normal distributions or slightly skewed unimodal distributions). Unfortunately, if we apply it to distributions with huge deviations from normality, we may experience a lot of troubles. In this post, I discuss some of the most important caveats which we should keep in mind if we use the median abs...

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