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

#descriptive statistics using the Swiss dataset
swiss
swiss_data<-swiss

#we are choosing the column fertility for this example
#let's begin with calculating the mean
mean(swiss_data$Fertility)

#median
median(swiss_data$Fertility)

#range
range(swiss_data$Fertility)

#standard deviation
sd(swiss_data$Fertility)

#summary - includes minimum, maximum, mean, median, 1st & 3rd Quartile
summary(swiss_data$Fertility)

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

Articles

Descriptive Statistics: An introduction

Descriptive Statistics: A detailed summary