In descriptive statistics, summary statistics are used to summarize a set of observations, in order to communicate the largest amount 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 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
A common collection of order statistics used as summary statistics are the five-number summary, sometimes extended to a seven-number summary, and the associated box plot.
Entries in an analysis of variance table can also be regarded as summary statistics.
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—Walter Pater (1839–1894)
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—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)