ABSTRACT
In many cases, we can derive analytical solutions to these questions based on rst principles. Oen, however, the answer has to be derived from empirical measurement. In this situation, the engineer will need to collect data in the eld to help answer the question. Aer plotting, the rst step is to quantify the data. In this chapter, we present several numerical summary measures for summarizing the available data in a useful and informative manner. is will include measures describing the center of a data set, other locations in a data set, variability in a data set, and the relationship between two variables in a bivariate data set. e appropriate
summary measures vary with the type of data, which are either categorical or numerical. Furthermore, if numerical, the data can be continuous or discrete.
