Descriptive and Inferential Statistics

A quick guide on the basic concepts used to describe data

“Facts are stubborn things, but statistics are pliable”

― Mark Twain

The job of a data analyst is not to come up with a lot of fancy reports containing tons of data as it may first seem. He needs to understand what the data can tell the business or help it solve existing problems.

Okay, we have data what’s next?

The next step is to get insights from them.

What are insights?

Insights are valuable knowledge obtained with the help of data analytics. It’s a very general definition because under the category of insides can fall a lot of things — from finding the most wasted category in your budget to understanding which movie will make more money for the cinema. Insights can be applied to the acquired data samples or to the whole population this data came from.

But unfortunately, in most cases, it is not possible to understand something simply by looking at the data. There is a lot of data and the raw data is not the most convenient object for making assumptions, the data should be characterized by a set of easily interpreted attributes. This is what descriptive…