As introduced in Chapter 3, descriptive statistics are the basic analyses of:

Don’t be mistaken: even the simplest of descriptive statistics are critical in business. Measures of centrality are used every day in thousands of business situations and they drive major strategic choices. Everything from average spending, investment returns, employee turnover statistics, production figures and many more are examples used in business. Even such simple statistics have traps that can sabotage business decisions, however, if the analysis is wrong.

In addition, if you are going on to do more complex statistics, it is important to do initial descriptive statistics to assess and understand your data. This chapter therefore describes and illustrates basic descriptive statistics for variables.

Before we explore more about these simple descriptive statistics, the following section shows the desired end state of a descriptive statistics analysis.