STAT 311 Lecture Notes - Lecture 5: Likert Scale, Descriptive Statistics, Summary Statistics
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Location statistics (mean / median / quartiles / extremes) Visualizing categorical data (pie charts and bar charts) These notes provide a brief overview of the most popular tools in the field of descriptive statistics. Recall that the field of descriptive statistics concerns itself only with describing a data set. We are not yet to the point of performing inferential statistics, which concerns itself with generalizing from a sample to a population. The two overall descriptive tools we will look at are calculating summary statistics and data visualization. First, we will consider some relevant characteristics of variables. Variables come in two types: quantitative and categorical. Quantitative variables numeric height, weight, number of customers, blood alcohol level. Example: an athlete"s jersey number is not quantitative. If you can do math, it"s a quantitative variable. Quantitative variables have values that we can do sensible math with. Categorical variables names or categories eye color, type of car, political affiliation, breed of dog.
