Descriptive statistics

Descriptive statistics are functions that summarize a given dataset, typically where the dataset represents a population or sample of a single variable (univariate data). They describe the dataset and form measures of a central tendency and measures of variability and dispersion.

For example, the following are descriptive statistics:

• The distribution (for example, normal, Poisson)
• The central tendency (for example, mean, median, and mode)
• The dispersion (for example, variance, standard deviation)

As we will see, the pandas Series and DataFrame objects have integrated support for a large number of descriptive statistics.