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| What is descriptive statistics |
This article "What is descriptive statistics" will leads us towards what are the 3 main types of descriptive statistics.
What Is Descriptive Statistics
Descriptive and inferential statistics are used in statistics to describe the characteristics of a given phenomenon, i.e., it deals with what can be measured. This section explains the main types of descriptive statistics used in business research.
Descriptive statistics are about how data describes something or it is derived from it. It includes various methods that help us make accurate statistical predictions. There are many approaches used to describe statistical properties in terms of their features in this section. Here, we will discuss only one of these approaches, so read on to explore more about it. The next section discusses the different types of sample sizes.
Descriptive statistics
Descriptive statistics are usually performed on categorical variables that represent a category of people. It provides information about the underlying characteristics of a single entity (e.g., age, income, occupation, marital status, gender). For example, the mean age of male college students is 26.4 years, which means that most members of this group fall between ages 25–34 years old.
Descriptive statistics may also be used for numerical variables, such as annual income or standard deviation of sales volume. You might be interested to know that this time I am trying to understand what are the basic differences between descriptive statistics and inferential statistics. In short, they both deal with data, but a significant difference will be discussed below.
Descriptive statistics usually follow general rules of thumb:
Describe a single variable that represents an entity; For instance, if you have 30 customers who are all female, you can say it means that your company offers high-quality products and has good customer service; Or, sales of cars for men and women are not equal, because a man might like driving a Jaguar, whereas a woman would prefer Mercedes-Benz; Describe any behavior of your customers, e.g, How often has our site become popular lately?
Descriptive statistics can also provide a complete description of trends over time. Let’s take the variable ‘the amount of money spent by my family in order of importance’, what is the distribution of its values? Is it normally distributed?
The 3 main types of descriptive statistics are as follows.
1) Frequency Distribution
2) Central Tendency
3) Dispersion
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| What is descriptive statistics |
Frequency Distribution
The frequency (f) is a particular value is the number of times the value occurs in the data. The distribution of a variable is a pattern of frequencies, it means the set of all possible values and the frequencies associated with these values. Frequency distributions are portrayed as frequency tables, graphs or charts.
classes frequency
1 - 10 6
11 - 20 5
21 - 30 3
31 - 40 5
41 - 50 8
Total 27
Charts, graphs and diagrams represents the selected data. Simple bar chart, Multiple bar chart, pie chart etc...........
Central Tendency
The second type of descriptive statistics is measure of central tendency. Central tendency tell us about the location r centre of the data. A single value which represents the whole data set.
For example, if there are 10 values in the data
X = 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10
Mean = observations in the data / total no. of observation.
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| What is descriptive statistics |
From the above image, there is a single value which represents the whole data set and lies in the center of data set is central tendency.
Dispersion
Central tendency describes the location of data set but Measure of dispersion describes variation among the data set.
In statistics, the measures of dispersion helps to interpret the variability of data i.e. to know how much the data is homogenous or heterogeneous.
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