Text summaries

The Summary option in the Explore tab provides us with some descriptive statistics such as Summary, Describe, Basics, Kurtosis, and Skewness reports. Descriptive statistics covers methods to summarize data. The Summary option also provides a very useful Show Missing report:

Summary reports

Rattle provides us with these summary reports:

• Summary

• Describe

• Basics

• Kurtosis

• Skewness

These reports summarize variable distributions and help to give an initial understanding of our data. In order to understand these reports, you only need a basic understanding of descriptive statistics.

Measures of central tendency – mean, median, and mode

For a variable, a measure of central tendency describes the center of the distribution as follows:

• Mean: The mean is the average and is the best central tendency measure if the distribution is normal.

• Median: Half of the observations have a lower value than this variable and the other half have a higher value. This is a good measure if there are extreme...