What is descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics is a branch of statistics that deals with summarizing, describing, and presenting data. The goal of descriptive statistics is to provide a concise summary of a large amount of data in a way that is easy to understand and interpret. This can be done by using various tools such as measures of central tendency (mean, median, mode) and measures of dispersion (range, variance, standard deviation) to summarize the data, and by using visualizations such as histograms, box plots, and scatter plots to present the data in a clear and visually appealing way.

Descriptive statistics can be used to answer questions such as: what is the average value of a certain variable? What is the most common value? How much does the data vary? And it can be applied to any type of data, such as numerical, categorical, ordinal, etc. Descriptive statistics can help to understand the nature of the data and to identify patterns or outliers. However, it is important to note that descriptive statistics is not the same as inferential statistics, which deals with making inferences about a population based on a sample of data.