Descriptive statistics

Faisal Nooh
Assistant professor of Epidemiology and Biostatistics
University of Hargeisa
The two branches of statistics
 Example
• Crude data like the one below is difficult to interpret.

An extract from crude

data collected during
family planning
consultations in one yr.
 Defining data

observation
Scale of measurement
Exercise
Purpose
Examining data
Summary measures for categorical data
 Graphical ways of summarising
categorical data
The distribution of marital status of 105 HIV+ TB patients can be summarized as either
Summary measures for numeric data
Measures of central value
Measures of central value
 Measures of central value
• It is useful if there are one or two extremely high or low values, which
would make the mean unrepresentative. Its disadvantage is that it does
not make use of all individual data values.

• Distributions can be further divided in quarters. The values that divide

the distribution that way are known as quartiles.
Measures of central value
 Which measure to use
• If the mean is much higher or lower than the median, it means there are
few extreme observations (very small or large) which influence the mean.
In this case the median is a better measure of central value.

Recalculate the mean and

median when the last
observation is 142 instead of
42.
Measures of variation

The range is based on only 2 values and gives no idea of how

the observations are arranged between them.
Measures of variation
Example
Graphical ways of summarising numeric
variables
Shapes of frequency distribution
Skewed distribution
Non-normally distributed data