We have seen many examples of descriptive statistics that we can use to summarize our data by its center and dispersion; in practice, looking at the 5-number summary or visualizing the distribution prove to be helpful first steps before diving into some of the other aforementioned metrics. The 5-number summary, as its name indicates, provides five descriptive statistics that summarize our data:
| Quartile | Statistic | Percentile | |
| 1. | Q0 | minimum | 0th |
| 2. | Q1 | N/A | 25th |
| 3. | Q2 | median | 50th |
| 4. | Q3 | N/A | 75th |
| 5. | Q4 | maximum | 100th |
Looking at the 5-number summary is a quick and efficient way of getting a sense of our data. At a glance, we have an idea of the distribution of the data and can move on to visualizing it.
The box plot ...
