Solved – Does mean = median imply that a unimodal distribution is symmetric

distributionsmeanmediansymmetry

For a unimodal distribution, if mean = median then is it sufficient to say that distribution is symmetric?

Wikipedia says in relationship between mean and median:

"If the distribution is symmetric then the mean is equal to the median
and the distribution will have zero skewness. If, in addition, the
distribution is unimodal, then the mean = median = mode. This is the
case of a coin toss or the series 1,2,3,4,… Note, however, that the
converse is not true in general, i.e. zero skewness does not imply
that the mean is equal to the median."

However, it is not very straight forward (to me) to glean the information I need. Any help please.

Best Answer

Here is a small counterexample that is not symmetric: -3, -2, 0, 0, 1, 4 is unimodal with mode = median = mean = 0.

Edit: An even smaller example is -2, -1, 0, 0, 3.

If you want to imagine a random variable rather than a sample, take the support as {-2, -1, 0, 3} with probability mass function 0.2 on all of them except for 0 where it is 0.4.