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    Descriptive Statistics: Measures of Central Tendency

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    Abdull Sulaiman Ismil
    Descriptive statistics help summarize and describe data in a meaningful way by identifying patterns and distributions, but cannot make conclusions beyond the analyzed data. There are two main types: measures of central tendency, like the mean and median, which describe the central position; and measures of spread, like variance and standard deviation, which describe how data values are dispersed. Descriptive statistics enable easier interpretation of large datasets by presenting tabulated, graphical, and statistical descriptions.

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    Descriptive Statistics: Measures of Central Tendency

    Uploaded by

    Abdull Sulaiman Ismil
    55 views3 pages
    Descriptive statistics help summarize and describe data in a meaningful way by identifying patterns and distributions, but cannot make conclusions beyond the analyzed data. There are two main types: measures of central tendency, like the mean and median, which describe the central position; and measures of spread, like variance and standard deviation, which describe how data values are dispersed. Descriptive statistics enable easier interpretation of large datasets by presenting tabulated, graphical, and statistical descriptions.

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    Descriptive statistics help summarize and describe data in a meaningful way by identifying patterns and distributions, but cannot make conclusions beyond the analyzed data. There are two main types: measures of central tendency, like the mean and median, which describe the central position; and measures of spread, like variance and standard deviation, which describe how data values are dispersed. Descriptive statistics enable easier interpretation of large datasets by presenting tabulated, graphical, and statistical descriptions.

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    © All Rights Reserved
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    Download as docx, pdf, or txt
    55 views3 pages

    Descriptive Statistics: Measures of Central Tendency

    Uploaded by

    Abdull Sulaiman Ismil
    Descriptive statistics help summarize and describe data in a meaningful way by identifying patterns and distributions, but cannot make conclusions beyond the analyzed data. There are two main types: measures of central tendency, like the mean and median, which describe the central position; and measures of spread, like variance and standard deviation, which describe how data values are dispersed. Descriptive statistics enable easier interpretation of large datasets by presenting tabulated, graphical, and statistical descriptions.

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    Descriptive Statistics

    Descriptive statistics is the term given to the analysis of data that helps
    describe, show or summarize data in a meaningful way such that, for
    example, patterns might emerge from the data. Descriptive statistics do
    not, however, allow us to make conclusions beyond the data we have
    analysed or reach conclusions regarding any hypotheses we might have
    made. They are simply a way to describe our data.
    Descriptive statistics are very important because if we simply presented our
    raw data it would be hard to visulize 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. For example, if we had the results of 100 pieces of students'
    coursework, we may be interested in the overall performance of those
    students. We would also be interested in the distribution or spread of the
    marks. Descriptive statistics allow us to do this. How to properly describe
    data through statistics and graphs is an important topic and discussed in
    other Laerd Statistics guides. Typically, there are two general types of
    statistic that are used to describe data:
    o Measures of central tendency: these are ways of
    describing the central position of a frequency distribution for
    a group of data. In this case, the frequency distribution is
    simply the distribution and pattern of marks scored by the
    100 students from the lowest to the highest. We can
    describe this central position using a number of statistics,
    including the mode, median, and mean. You can read about
    measures of central tendency here.

    o Measures of spread: these are ways of summarizing a


    group of data by describing how spread out the scores are.
    For example, the mean score of our 100 students may be 65
    out of 100. However, not all students will have scored 65
    marks. Rather, their scores will be spread out. Some will be

    lower and others higher. Measures of spread help us to


    summarize how spread out these scores are. To describe this
    spread, a number of statistics are available to us, including
    the range, quartiles, absolute deviation, variance
    andstandard deviation.
    When we use descriptive statistics it is useful to summarize our
    group of data using a combination of tabulated description (i.e.,
    tables), graphical description (i.e., graphs and charts) and
    statistical commentary (i.e., a discussion of the results).

    Inferential Statistics
    We have seen that descriptive statistics provide information about
    our immediate group of data. For example, we could calculate the
    mean and standard deviation of the exam marks for the 100
    students and this could provide valuable information about this
    group of 100 students. Any group of data like this, which includes
    all the data you are interested in, is called a population. A
    population can be small or large, as long as it includes all the data
    you are interested in. For example, if you were only interested in
    the exam marks of 100 students, the 100 students would
    represent your population. Descriptive statistics are applied to
    populations, and the properties of populations, like the mean or
    standard deviation, are called parameters as they represent the
    whole population (i.e., everybody you are interested in).
    Often, however, you do not have access to the whole population
    you are interested in investigating, but only a limited number of
    data instead. For example, you might be interested in the exam
    marks of all students in the UK. It is not feasible to measure all
    exam marks of all students in the whole of the UK so you have to
    measure a smaller sample of students (e.g., 100 students), which
    are used to represent the larger population of all UK students.
    Properties of samples, such as the mean or standard deviation,
    are not called parameters, but statistics. Inferential statistics are
    techniques that allow us to use these samples to make

    generalizations about the populations from which the samples


    were drawn. It is, therefore, important that the sample accurately
    represents the population. The process of achieving this is called
    sampling (sampling strategies are discussed in detail here on our
    sister site). Inferential statistics arise out of the fact that sampling
    naturally incurs sampling error and thus a sample is not expected
    to perfectly represent the population. The methods of inferential
    statistics are (1) the estimation of parameter(s) and (2) testing of
    statistical hypotheses.

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