Practical Predictive Analytics

Summary statistics

It is usually a good idea to begin analysis with look at summary statistics for every candidate variable which might appear in a model. Means, standard deviations, frequencies, and skewness allow quick generalization about how you expect a variable to behave. Special consideration should also be given when examining any variable deemed to be a target variable.

To display basic summary statistics about a single variable, use the R Summary() function. This can be issued as part of an R scripts or directly from the command line. The general form of the Summary() function is:

#for a single variableSummary(dataframe$variable) #for all of the variablesSummary(dataframe)   

Two other typical single variable analysis summary techniques ...