What is the importance of descriptive statistics?
1 Answer
Descriptive statistics is the discipline of quantitatively describing the main features of a collection of information, or the quantitative description itself.
Descriptive statistics are very important because if we simply presented our raw data it would be hard to visulize what the data was showing, especially if there was a lot of it. Descriptive statistics therefore enables us to present the data in a more meaningful way, which allows simpler interpretation of the data.
For example, if we had the results of 100 pieces of students' coursework, we may be interested in the overall performance of those students. We would also be interested in the distribution or spread of the marks. Descriptive statistics allow us to do this. How to properly describe data through statistics and graphs is an important topic and discussed in other Laerd Statistics guides. Typically, there are two general types of statistic that are used to describe data:
Measures of central tendency: these are ways of describing the central position of a frequency distribution for a group of data. In this case, the frequency distribution is simply the distribution and pattern of marks scored by the 100 students from the lowest to the highest.
Measures of spread: these are ways of summarizing a group of data by describing how spread out the scores are. For example, the mean score of our 100 students may be 65 out of 100. However, not all students will have scored 65 marks. Rather, their scores will be spread out. Some will be lower and others higher. Measures of spread help us to summarize how spread out these scores are.
When we use descriptive statistics it is useful to summarize our group of data using a combination of tabulated description (i.e., tables), graphical description (i.e., graphs and charts) and statistical commentary (i.e., a discussion of the results).
https://statistics.laerd.com/statistical-guides/descriptive-inferential-statistics.php
