Summary statistic in the context of "Precision (statistics)"

A descriptive statistic (in the count noun sense) is a summary statistic that quantitatively describes or summarizes features from a collection of information, while descriptive statistics (in the mass noun sense) is the process of using and analysing those statistics. Descriptive statistics is distinguished from inferential statistics (or inductive statistics) by its aim to summarize a sample, rather than use the data to learn about the population that the sample of data is thought to represent. This generally means that descriptive statistics, unlike inferential statistics, is not developed on the basis of probability theory, and are frequently nonparametric statistics. Even when a data analysis draws its main conclusions using inferential statistics, descriptive statistics are generally also presented. For example, in papers reporting on human subjects, typically a table is included giving the overall sample size, sample sizes in important subgroups (e.g., for each treatment or exposure group), and demographic or clinical characteristics such as the average age, the proportion of subjects of each sex, the proportion of subjects with related co-morbidities, etc.

Some measures that are commonly used to describe a data set are measures of central tendency and measures of variability or dispersion. Measures of central tendency include the mean, median and mode, while measures of variability include the standard deviation (or variance), the minimum and maximum values of the variables, kurtosis and skewness.

In statistics, the mode is the value that appears most often in a set of data values. If X is a discrete random variable, the mode is the value x at which the probability mass function P(X) takes its maximum value, i.e., x = argmax_xi P(X = x_i). In other words, it is the value that is most likely to be sampled.

Like the statistical mean and median, the mode is a summary statistic about the central tendency of a random variable or a population. The numerical value of the mode is the same as that of the mean and median in a normal distribution, but it may be very different in highly skewed distributions.