ABSTRACT
This chapter makes use of statistics for descriptive analytics. Specifically, we use descriptive statistics that concisely summarize the information content of collected observational data via distributions, measures of central tendency, and measures of dispersion. A distribution is a summary of the frequency of individual values or ranges of values for a variable. Analysts and researchers often need to know the distribution of a population of interest for certain applications. Once the distribution of a population is known, it can then be used to compute the probability of a future observation. Distributions aid exploratory data analyses to maximize insight into a data set, uncover underlying structures, and extract important information. Here we present the most commonly used distributions for analytics, along with the ones used to build some of the AI and ML techniques covered in this book.
