One situation in which it can be advantageous to use a truncated mean is when estimating the location parameter of a Cauchy distribution, a bell shaped probability distribution with (much) fatter tails than a normal distribution. It can be shown that the truncated mean of the middle 24% sample order statistics (i.e., truncate the sample by 38% at each end) produces an estimate for the population location parameter that is more efficient than using either the sample median or the full sample mean. However, due to the fat tails of the Cauchy distribution, the efficiency of the estimator decreases as more of the sample gets used in the estimate. Note that for the Cauchy distribution, neither the truncated mean, full sample mean or sample median represents a maximum likelihood estimator, nor are any as asymptotically efficient as the maximum likelihood estimator; however, the maximum likelihood estimate is more difficult to compute, leaving the truncated mean as a useful alternative.
