I'm new to stats and have an assignment where they ask for the descriptive statistics for some variables. I typically think of these as central tendency and variability, but some of the variables are categorical. By definition of descriptive statistics I think frequencies would count, but I haven't seen it explicitly stated. Thanks!
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4$\begingroup$ You can see this explicitly stated by conducting a suitable search. Try google.com/… for instance. $\endgroup$– whuber ♦Commented Feb 8, 2017 at 23:23
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2 Answers
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I like Wikipedia's definition: "Descriptive statistics are statistics that quantitatively describe or summarize features of a collection of information." If this is how you define descriptive statistics, the answer is "yes."
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$\begingroup$ Thank you. I think overall I'm going to go with this answer. The only hiccup is that some sites don't list frequencies - I certainly haven't seen a source that explicitly states that they are NOT descriptive statistics though. $\endgroup$ Commented Feb 9, 2017 at 0:36
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Descriptive Statistics encompasses Mode(A value that occurs with greatest frequency) in the Measures of Location. Also when we make tabular, graphical and numerical summaries of data to describe data, we include information on how much or how many of something. We include Histograms to analyze distribution of data. Histograms are based on frequency of occurrences too. Hence, Descriptive Statistics includes frequencies.
