Business Statistics Made Easy in SAS

Step 3: Extracting Statistics from the Data

Brief Introduction to Statistics

As discussed in the previous section, a dataset is not usually helpful on its own. The process is actually to extract from your data just a few representative numbers – we call these statistics – that tell us something about the data and therefore give us condensed information about the piece of world we are studying. Here are some examples:

1. An average: The simple average (say the average age of your employees) is a good example: the average is a single number summarizing all age data of all your employees.
2. Statistics that measure relationships between concepts: Other types of statistics summarize relationships between concepts. Figure 2.1 The fundamental ...