In descriptive statistics, summary statistics are used to summarize a set
of observations, in order to communicate the largest amount of information as
simply as possible. Statisticians commonly try to describe the observations in
- a measure of location, or central tendency, such as the arithmetic mean
- a measure of statistical dispersion like the standard mean absolute deviation
- a measure of the shape of the distribution like skewness or kurtosis
- if more than one variable is measured, a measure of statistical dependence such as a correlation coefficient
A common collection of order statistics used as summary statistics are the
five-number summary, sometimes extended to a seven-number summary, and the
associated box pl…