Descriptive Statistics

As mentioned before, descriptive statistics and inferential statistics are the two main categories in the field of statistics. With descriptive statistics, our goal is to compute specific quantities that can convey important information about—or in other words, describe—our data.

From within descriptive statistics, there are two main subcategories: central tendency statistics and dispersion statistics. The actual terms are suggestive of their respective meaning: central tendency statistics are responsible for describing the center of the distribution of the given data, while dispersion statistics convey information about the spread or range of the data away from its center.

One of the clearest examples of this distinction is from the familiar normal distribution, whose statistics include a mean and a standard deviation. The mean, which is calculated to be the average of all the values from the probability distribution, is suitable for estimating...