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Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive Analytics involves gathering, organizing, tabulating, and depicting data to describe characteristics of what is being studied. It provides insight into past events by answering "What happened?" through data aggregation and mining. The vast majority of analytics used fall into this category, such as calculating sums, averages, and percent changes. Descriptive Analytics are useful for showing historical insights like inventory levels, customer spending, and year-over-year sales changes. It seeks to present data in an easily understandable format.

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Aparna Singh
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290 views

Descriptive Analytics

Descriptive Analytics involves gathering, organizing, tabulating, and depicting data to describe characteristics of what is being studied. It provides insight into past events by answering "What happened?" through data aggregation and mining. The vast majority of analytics used fall into this category, such as calculating sums, averages, and percent changes. Descriptive Analytics are useful for showing historical insights like inventory levels, customer spending, and year-over-year sales changes. It seeks to present data in an easily understandable format.

Uploaded by

Aparna Singh
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Descriptive Analytics:

It involves gathering,
organizing, tabulating and
depicting data and then
describing the characteristics
about what is being studied.
This type of analytics was
historically called reporting. It
can be very useful but does
not tell you anything about
what might have happen in the future.

Descriptive Analytics, which use data aggregation and data mining to


provide insight into the past and answer: “What has happened?”

The vast majority of the analytics we use fall into this category. (Think basic
arithmetic like sums, averages, percent changes). Usually, the underlying
data is a count, or aggregate of a filtered column of data to which basic
math is applied. For all practical purposes, there are an infinite number of
these Analytics. Descriptive Analytics are useful to show things like, total
stock in inventory, average dollars spent per customer and Year over year
change in sales. Common examples of descriptive analytics are reports that
provide historical insights regarding the company’s production, financials,
operations, sales, finance, inventory and customers.

Use Descriptive Analytics when you need to understand at an aggregate level


what is going on in your company, and when you want to summarize and
describe different aspects of your business.

Descriptive Analytics, the conventional form of


Business Intelligence and data analysis, seeks to
provide a depiction or “summary view” of facts
and figures in an understandable format, to
either inform or prepare data for further
analysis. It uses two primary techniques, namely
data aggregation and data mining to report past
events. It presents past data in an easily digestible format for the benefit of a
wide business audience.

A common example of Descriptive Analytics are company reports that simply


provide a historic review of an organization’s operations, sales, financials,
customers, and stakeholders. It is relevant to note that in the Big Data
world, the “simple nuggets of information” provided by Descriptive Analytics
become prepared inputs for more advanced Predictive or Prescriptive
Analytics that deliver real-time insights for business decision making.
Descriptive Analytics helps to describe and present data in a format which
can be easily understood by a wide variety of business readers. Descriptive
Analytics rarely attempts to investigate or establish cause and effect
relationships. As this form of analytics doesn’t usually probe beyond surface
analysis, the validity of results is more easily implemented. Some common
methods employed in Descriptive Analytics are observations, case studies,
and surveys. Thus, collection and interpretation of large amount of data
may be involved in this type of analytics.
In Descriptive, Predictive, and Prescriptive Analytics, it argues that both in
Predictive and Prescriptive Analytics, the data analyst has to “investigate”
beyond surface data. While the predictive data analyst uses investigation to
understand the future, the prescriptive data analyst uses investigation to
suggest probable actions. In contrast to both, the descriptive analyst simply
offers the existing data in a more understandable format without any further
investigation. Thus, Descriptive Analytics is more suited for a historical
account or a summary of past data. Most statistical calculations are
generally applied to Descriptive Analytics.
In Information Week’s Big Data Analytics: Descriptive vs. Predictive vs.
Prescriptive, Dr. Michael Wu, Chief Scientist of Lithium Technologies in San
Francisco, describes Descriptive Analytics as the simplest form of Data
Analytics, which captures Big Data in small nuggets of information. As Wu
observes, 80% of Business Analytics falls within the ambit of Descriptive
Analytics.
The three different types of Data Analytics, any good Data Scientist may try
to use the results of Descriptive Analytics and further tweak the data or
trends or pattern analysis to forecast future trends in business.
Examples of Descriptive Analytics
Here are some common applications of Descriptive Analytics:

 Tabulation and Visualizing of insights of data.


 Summarizing past events such as regional sales, customer attrition,
or success of marketing campaigns.
 Tabulation of social metrics such as Facebook likes, Tweets, or
followers.
 Reporting of general trends like hot travel destinations or news trends.

Slide 3:

Tabulation:

Generating frequency tables using R

R provides many methods for creating frequency and contingency tables. Three are
described below. In the following examples, assume that A, B, and C represent categorical
variables.

Table

You can generate frequency tables using the table( ) function, tables of proportions using

the prop.table( ) function, and marginal frequencies using margin.table( ).

mtcars
nrow(mtcars)
table(mtcars$cyl)
mtcars%>%count(cyl)
x=mtcars%>%count(cyl)
x$prop=(x$n)/32
x
x$per=((x$n)/32)*100
x$cum=cumsum(x$n)
x
Crosstable
The CrossTable( ) function in the gmodels package produces cross tabulations
modelled after PROC FREQ in SAS or CROSSTABS in SPSS. It has a wealth of
options.
There are options to report percentages (row, column, cell), specify decimal places,
produce Chi-square, Fisher, and McNemar tests of independence, report expected
and residual values (pearson, standardized, adjusted standardized), include missing
values as valid, annotate with row and column titles, and format
as SAS or SPSS style output. See help(CrossTable) for details.

# cross tabulations
CrossTable(mtcars$cyl,mtcars$vs) # gmodels package

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