ABSTRACT
Descriptive statistics are values of attributes which are calculated from sample data and are used either to describe sample characteristics or to estimate population parameters. The descriptive statistics most often used in engineering are the mean and the standard deviation. Weighted means are useful for far more than just calculating grade point averages. There are several statistics that are used to quantify the magnitude of a deviation, relative to some base situation. Engineering and science often remove unity values from equations, because when doing the calculation, they have no impact on the result. The most common measures are arithmetic average (for data centrality) and sample standard deviation (for data variability). Most data will be nearly normally distributed, making the average and standard deviation very meaningful.
