Translating Statistics to Make Decisions: A Guide for the Non-Statistician

© Victoria Cox 2017

Victoria Cox, Translating Statistics to Make Decisions , 10.1007/978-1-4842-2256-0_4

4. Descriptive Statistics

What Can the Data Tell Me?

Victoria Cox¹ 

(1)Dstl, Salisbury, UK

The aim of calculating descriptive statistics is to summarize the sample you have collected. The key thing here is that these values or plots correspond only to the sample, there is no uncertainty and therefore the results can’t be generalized to describe the population that step is the basis of Chapter 5.

Figure 4-1 shows the relationship between samples and populations with the following description:

• Top left: the population consists of the entirety of everything you are interested in, for example, all of the lupine flowers in the world.

• Top right: if the ...