A weighted average, or weighted mean, is an average in which some data points contribute more 'weight' than others. If all the weights are equal, then the weighted average is the same as the simple arithmetic mean. Weighted averages are common in many fields, including statistics, finance, and academia, to give more importance to certain values in a dataset.
The core idea is that each value is multiplied by its corresponding weight, and the sum of these products is then divided by the sum of all the weights.