Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics is a branch of statistics that involves the organization, summarization, and display of data. Descriptive statistics provides simple summaries about the sample and the measures. Together with simple graphics analysis, they form the basis of virtually every quantitative analysis of data.

Overview

Descriptive statistics are distinguished from inferential statistics (or inductive statistics), in that descriptive statistics aim to summarize a data sample, rather than use the data to learn about the population that the sample of data is thought to represent. This generally means that descriptive statistics, unlike inferential statistics, are not developed on the basis of probability theory.

Measures

Descriptive statistics provide simple summaries about the sample and the measures. These summaries may either form the basis of the initial description of the data as part of a more extensive statistical analysis, or they may be sufficient in and of themselves for a particular investigation.

Measures of central tendency

Measures of central tendency include the mean, median, and mode, which are used to describe the center of a data set.

Measures of spread

Measures of spread include the range, quartiles, absolute deviation, variance and standard deviation.

See also

• Inferential statistics
• Data analysis
• Probability theory
• Mean
• Median
• Mode
• Range
• Quartile
• Absolute deviation
• Variance
• Standard deviation

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