Summary_Statistics

back to Statistical Theory -- Summarizing Statistical Data

The easiest way to approach this subject is to focus on what we have and what we want to achieve:

We have a set of observations which we want to summarize.

We want to communicate as much as possible as simply as possible.

Statisticians commonly try to describe the observations in

a measure of Central Tendency like the Arithmetic Mean, and

a measure of Statistical Dispersion like the Standard Deviation.

There are other alternatives, of course. The Median and Mode are both measures of Central Tendancy. To describe the Statistical Dispersion, we can use the Statistical Range, the Interquartile Range, or the Absolute Deviation.

Dick Beldin