One advantage of Winsorizing is that the calculation may be more efficient. In order to calculate a true truncated mean, you need to sort all of the data elements, and that is typically O(nlogn). However there are efficient ways of figuring out just the 25% and 75% percentiles using a the quick select algorithm, which is typically O(n). If you know these end points, you can quickly loop over the data again, and replace values less than 25% with the 25% value and more than 75% with 75% and average. This is identical to the Winsor mean. But looping over the data and only averaging data between the 25% value and 75% value is NOT identical to the truncated mean, because the 25% or 75% values may not be a unique value. Consider the data sequence (1,2,3,4,4). The Winsor mean is (2+2+3+4+4)/5. The correct truncated mean should be (2+3+4)/3. The "quick-select" optimized truncated mean will be (2+3+4+4)/4.