Summary statistics

[1]: 378 Common measures of location, or central tendency, are the arithmetic mean, median, mode, and interquartile mean.

Measures that assess spread in comparison to the typical size of data values include the coefficient of variation.

A simple summary of a dataset is sometimes given by quoting particular order statistics as approximations to selected percentiles of a distribution.

Common measures of the shape of a distribution are skewness or kurtosis, while alternatives can be based on L-moments.

Humans efficiently use summary statistics to quickly perceive the gist of auditory and visual information.

Box plot of the Michelson–Morley experiment , showing several summary statistics.