Chapter 35. Summarizing Data with Descriptive Statistics

  • What defines a typical value for a data set?

  • How can I measure how much a data set spreads out from its typical value?

  • Together, what do the mean and standard deviation of a data set tell me about the data?

  • How can I use descriptive statistics to compare data sets?

  • How can I find the 90th percentile of a data set? For a given data point, can I easily find its percentile ranking within the data set?

In Chapter 34, I showed how you can describe data sets by using histograms. In this chapter, I’ll show how to describe a data set by using particular properties of the data, such as the mean, median, standard deviation, and variance—measures that Excel groups together as descriptive statistics ...

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