Descriptive Statistics

Descriptive statistics helps to simplify large amounts of data in a sensible way. In contrast to inferential statistics, which will be introduced in a later chapter, in descriptive statistics we do not draw conclusions beyond the data we are analyzing; neither do we reach any conclusions regarding hypotheses we may make. We do not try to infer characteristics of the “population” (see below) of the data, but claim to present quantitative descriptions of it in a manageable form. It is simply a way to describe the data.