In this session, you learnt about measures in descriptive statistics.

There are three such

measures: measures of central tendency, measures of dispersion and measures of
shape. You learnt about all three of them in detail.

There are three measures in descriptive statistics as mentioned below:

1. Central tendency
2. Dispersion
3. Shape
You first learnt about central Tendency. Central tendency is a measure that describes a
set of data by determining the central location of the dataset. In statistics, a central
tendency is a central or typical value of a probability distribution. Measures of central
tendency are often referred to as averages. There are three measures of central
tendency, which are as follows:
1. Mean
2. Median
3. Mode
The formula to calculate the mean is shown in the following image.

Further, you were introduced to median and mode.

1. Median of a distribution is the value of the variable that divides it into two equal
parts. It is the value that exceeds and is exceeded by the same number of
observations.
2. Other positional averages are quantiles. The pth quantile for the distribution of a
variable is the value:
 a. For which the proportion of values below that value is >= p, and
b. For which the proportion of values above that value is >= (1-p).
3. Median has important demerits; in the case of an even number of observations,
median cannot be determined exactly and will not belong to the dataset.
4. Mode is the value that occurs most frequently in a set of observations and around
which the other items of the set cluster. In other words, the mode is the value of
the variable that is predominant in the series.

In this segment, you learnt about measures of dispersion.

1. Measures of dispersion are used to quantify the amount of scatteredness or
variation present in the data. They inform about the variability of the data.
2. Measures of dispersion can be categorised into distance measures (range and
interquartile) and average of deviations (mean deviation or standard deviation).
3. The range is the difference between two extreme observations of a distribution.
4. The interquartile range gives the variability between the third and the first quartile.
5. Mean deviation measures the variability from the central value or the average
value.
6. Standard deviation is calculated as the positive square root of the sum of squared
deviations from the arithmetic mean.

In this segment, you learnt about measures of shape.

1. Measures of shape, as descriptive statistics, provide us ways to understand how
the data points in a dataset are distributed and also help us understand the
patterns that may be concealed and can be understood once the data is plotted
on the graph.
2. There are two measures of shape: skewness and kurtosis.
3. A distribution is said to skewed if:
a. Mean, median and mode fall at different points, i.e., mean is not equal to
median, and median is not equal to mode,
b. Quartiles are not equidistant from the median, and
 c. The curve drawn with the help of the given data is not symmetrical but is
stretched more to one side than to the other.
4. In addition to the other measures, we also need to calculate kurtosis [‘convexity of
the frequency curve’]. It gives us an idea about the ‘flatness or peakedness of the
frequency distribution curve’.
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