Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics

Descriptive Statistics is the most basic things you can do in statistics. Most of you probably also already calculated things like mean and median in school.

Descriptive stats are what most people think stats are all about. Many people believe that the simple observation of more or less, or the mere calculation of an average value is what statistics are all about. The media often shows us such descriptive statistics in whimsical bar plots or even pie charts.

This graphic visualizes what mean, mode and median explain regarding a dataset.

Mean

Median

Mode

Range

Standard deviation

This graph shows how the standard deviation is spread from the mean.

External Links

Videos

Descriptive Statistics: A whole video series about descriptive statistics from the Khan academy

Standard Deviation: A brief explanation

Mode, Median, Mean, Range & Standard Deviation: A good summary