This question evaluates understanding of L1 loss and robust point estimation, testing concepts from statistics such as absolute deviation, order statistics, and properties of estimators under non-quadratic loss, and it belongs to the Statistics & Math domain for data scientist roles.
Suppose you have observed target values , and you want to fit the simplest possible model that predicts the same constant value for every observation:
Define the objective function using absolute error:
What value of minimizes ? Derive the result and explain whether the minimizer is always unique.