Five-number summary

The five-number summary is a set of descriptive statistics that provides information about a dataset.

It consists of the five most important sample percentiles: In addition to the median of a single set of data there are two related statistics called the upper and lower quartiles.

In order for these statistics to exist, the observations must be from a univariate variable that can be measured on an ordinal, interval or ratio scale.

The five-number summary gives information about the location (from the median), spread (from the quartiles) and range (from the sample minimum and maximum) of the observations.

It is possible to calculate the five-number summary in the R programming language using the fivenum function.