Descriptive statistics are numbers or diagrams that help make sense of data. If we have 500 data points, we don't want to look at them all individually, we want to tell a story about the group. To tell this story we want to answer questions like:

- Where is the data centered?

- What's the most frequent outcome?

- How much more frequent is one outcome than another?

- How does this data from one set differ from another?

Descriptive statistics help us organize data so that we can eventually infer something about a population later in the course.