IBM Data Science Practice Test

Descriptive statistics focuses on summarizing and describing the characteristics of a dataset. The measure of central tendency, which includes the mean, median, and mode, is a fundamental aspect of descriptive statistics. These measures provide important insights by indicating where the center of a dataset lies, allowing researchers to understand the typical value in the data distribution.

In contrast, while the other activities such as measures of p-value, dispersion, and variation also relate to statistical analysis, they do not primarily represent descriptive statistics. The measure of p-value is a concept used in inferential statistics to assess the significance of results in hypothesis testing. Measures of dispersion, like range and standard deviation, indicate how spread out the values in a dataset are; whereas, measures of variation often refer to the same concept but more specifically quantify the degree of variation. While important, these latter types of measures do not encapsulate one of the basic tenets of descriptive statistics, which is the central tendency.