Summary statistics
In descriptive statistics, summary statistics are used to summarize a set of observations, in order to communicate the largest amount of information as simply as possible. Statisticians commonly try to describe the observations in
- a measure of location, or central tendency, such as the arithmetic mean
- a measure of statistical dispersion like the standard mean absolute deviation
- a measure of the shape of the distribution like skewness or kurtosis
- if more than one variable is measured, a measure of statistical dependence such as a correlation coefficient
Entries in an analysis of variance table can also be regarded as summary statistics.
Examples
Location
Common measures of location, or central tendency, are the arithmetic mean, median, mode, and interquartile mean.Spread
Common measures of statistical dispersion are the standard deviation, variance, range, interquartile range, absolute deviation, mean absolute difference and the distance standard deviation. Measures that assess spread in comparison to the typical size of data values include the coefficient of variation.The Gini coefficient was originally developed to measure income inequality and is equivalent to one of the L-moments.
A simple summary of a dataset is sometimes given by quoting particular order statistics as approximations to selected percentiles of a distribution.