Summary statistics
From Biocrawler, the free encyclopedia.
In descriptive statistics, summary statistics are used to summarize a set of observations, in order to communicate as much as possible as simply as possible. Statisticians commonly try to describe the observations in
- a measure of location, or central tendency, such as the arithmetic mean, median, mode, or interquartile mean
- a measure of statistical dispersion like the standard deviation, variance, range, or interquartile range, or absolute deviation.
- a measure of the shape of the distribution like skewness or kurtosis
The Gini coefficient was originally developed to measure income inequality, but can be used for other purposes as well.
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See also
descriptive statistics, statistical theory
