Descriptive Statistics

Statistics plays an important role in the description of mass phenomena. It offers methods to summarize a collection of data. These methods may be numerical or graphical, both of which have their own advantages and disadvantages. Graphical methods are better suited for the recognition of patterns in the data, whereas numerical methods give well-defined measures of some properties. In general, it is recommended to use both approaches for the description of data.

A field which is closely related to descriptive statistics, is exploratory data analysis.