Okuzeka
Data Science & Analytics vocabulary · Exploratory Analysis

Summary statistics

Meaning in data science & analytics, with examples

nounCommon term

In data science & analytics, summary statistics means: A small set of numbers that describe a dataset at a glance, such as the count, mean, median, minimum, maximum and standard deviation of each column.

In Turkish: özet istatistikler, tanımlayıcı istatistikler

How it is used

Usually the first thing you calculate in EDA, and most tools have a one-line command for it, such as describe() in pandas. Also called descriptive statistics. You compute, report or check summary statistics.

Example sentences

  1. The summary statistics show a maximum age of 212, so something's wrong with the data.

  2. Start the report with a table of summary statistics for each region.

Common collocations

  • compute summary statistics
  • table of summary statistics
  • descriptive statistics
  • basic summary statistics
  • exploratory data analysisThe first stage of an analysis, in which you summarise and plot a dataset to understand its structure, spot patterns and problems, and form questions to test.
  • meanThe value you get by adding all the numbers in a group and dividing the total by how many numbers there are; the usual meaning of 'average'.
  • medianThe middle value when all the numbers in a group are sorted from smallest to largest; half the values are below it and half are above it.
  • standard deviationA measure of how spread out values are around the mean: a small value means most values are close to the average, a large one means they vary a lot.

This word in other fields

The same English word can have a different meaning in another field:

More terms: Exploratory Analysis

Practise with graded reading

Reading at the right level is the fastest way to make new words stick. Pick free English books by level: