What is descriptive statistics and why is it important?

Expert Solution

Descriptive statistics are brief descriptive coefficients that summarize a given data set, which can be either a representation of the entire or a sample of a population.

Descriptive statistics are broken down into measures of central tendency and measures of variability (spread).

Measure of central tendency include the mean, median, and mode, while measures of variability include the standard deviation, variance, the minimum and maximum variables, and the kurtosis and skewness.

IMPORTANT POINTS

1. Descriptive statistics summarizes or describes characteristics of a data set.

2. Descriptivestatistics consists of two basic categories of measures: measures of central tendency and measures of variability or spread.

3. Measure of central tendency describe the center of a data set.

4. Measure of variability or spread describe the dispersion of data within.

Descriptive statistics are very important because if we simply presented our raw data it would be hard to visualize what the data was showing, especially if there was a lot of it.

Descriptive statistics therefore enables us to present the data in a more meaningful way, which allows simpler interpretation of the data.

orchestra answered 2 years ago

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