This now concludes my overview of the basic descriptive statistics. Each topic can
of course be explored far deeper, but for the beginner this is perhaps enough for
now.
These sorts of descriptive statistics are crucial. For one thing, they tell you various
things about your fundamental data, which sometimes – in the case of things like industry
or market reports – forms the statistics under main focus anyway.
In addition, a common use for descriptive statistics is the analysis of data for problems.
Even if you are not a statistician, as I mentioned in Chapter 1 if you are commissioning
statistics you may wish to get reports on the data so that you can direct better practices
from your statisticians. If you are reading a report, you may wish to critique the
data to understand whether the statistics are suspect. Chapter 9 discusses this use
of descriptive statistics.
You will have noticed that these descriptive statistics deal with only one variable
at a time. The next chapter deals with associations between multiple variables.