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.