Saturday, December 25, 2010

scientificsoftwareandbooks.
blogspot.com Dr. Suji George

Descriptive Statistics

when you acquire a set of numbers you would want

to examine the data to find out distribution, maxium
and minimum values outliers etc. This is an impor-
tant part of data analysis, since it helps you to know
if you data meet assumptions required by other
analyses such as t-test. For this example, we’ll look
at the given below table. 





In Excel, select Tools/Data
Analysis/Descriptive Sta-
tistics. (If the Data Analysis
option is not on your Tools
menu, you must first install
it using Tools/Add ins) . 
 
Select the input range. In 
this case it is $A$2:$A$10.  Be sure to select the check boxes Summary Statistics
and Confidence level for mean (95% is okay). The
 output created is shown here: 
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 Saturday, December 25, 2010
scientificsoftwareandbooks.
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Descriptive Statistics

formula for the standard error for kurtosis is

=SQRT(24/N) = 1.63 .Twice this amount is 3.2. Since
the value of kurtosis falls within two standard errors
(-0.28) the data may be considered to meet the cri-
teria for normality by this measure. These measures
of skewness and kurtosis are one method of exami-
ning the distribution of the data. However, they are
not definitive in concluding normality. 

Estimate of central tendency:

For normally distributed data the mean (arithme-
tic average) is the typical value to use in a report.
The median is another measure of central tenden-
cy and is usually reported when the data are not
normally distributed. The mode, or the most fre-
quent value, is a third measure of central tendency.

 
 Measures of variability:
Information you should notice includes:  
 The measures of variability reported in Excel’s des-
Symmetry: criptive statistics include the standard error, the
 standard deviation and the variance as well as the
The Skewness measure indicates the level of non- range. The first three measures are related in the
symmetry. If the distribution of the data are sym- following ways:
metric then skewness will be close to 0 (zero). The 
further from 0, the more skewed the data. A nega- Standard Deviation = SQRT(Variance)
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tive value indicates a skew to the left. How do you 

tell if the skewness is large enough to case concern.
Excel doesn’t give you this value, but a measure of
the standard error of skewness can be calculated
as =SQRT(6/N) or =SQRT(6/9 which is 0.816. If the
skewness is more than twice this amount, then it
indicates that the distribution of the data is non-
symmetric. In this case 0.816 * 2 = 1.69. The skewness
reported by Excel is -0.214 so the data can be assu-
med to be fairly symmetric. However, this does NOT
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Standard Error = Standard Deviation / SQRT(N)


Coefficient of Variation: 

Another measure often reported is the coefficient
of variation. This measure provides a unitless mea-
sure of the variation of the sate by translating it into
a percentage of the mean value. This measure not

indicate that the data are normally distributed.  provided by Excel, but is easily calculated by the
 formula:
Kurtosis is a measure of the peakedness of the data. 
Again, for normally distributed data the kurtosis is CV = (Standard Deviation / Mean) * 100
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0 (zero). As with skewness, if the value of kurtosis 

is too big or too small, there is concern about the 
normality of the distribution. In this case, a rough 

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Descriptive Statistics





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