Descriptive statistics

In this video, you were introduced to descriptive statistics. As we learned earlier, descriptive statistics describe data to help the audience construct a mental picture of it. To do this, you can present key attributes that describe the centre or the spread of the data.

• Measures of centre (commonly referred to as the ‘average’) include the mean, median, and mode.
• Measures of spread include range, interquartile range, standard deviation, and variance.

We will learn about these concepts in detail in the upcoming sections.

Given the limited scope of this course, you will be using measures of central tendency and measures of spread to describe and analyse a data set. In case you are eager to learn about and perform complex statistical analyses such as the p-value test to test a hypothesis, you are encouraged to sign up for our upcoming microcredential on data science for business, which will cover these topics in greater detail.

Next, you’ll learn how to calculate the measures of central tendency.