The summary() function provides a handy overview of descriptive statistics. There is also another function that can do the same thing, and provides more useful information: describe() from the psych package. We need to install the psych package once and then can load it via the library command.
install.packages("psych")
# Downloading packages -------------------------------------------------------
- Downloading psych from CRAN ... OK [1.1 Mb in 0.16s]
Successfully downloaded 1 package in 2.3 seconds.
The following package(s) will be installed:
- psych [2.6.3]
These packages will be installed into "~/Documents/Open-Stat-Prog/descriptive-statistics/renv/library/macos/R-4.4/aarch64-apple-darwin20".
# Installing packages --------------------------------------------------------
- Installing psych ... OK [built from source and cached in 16s]
Successfully installed 1 package in 16 seconds.
library(psych)describe(stocks)
vars n mean sd median trimmed mad min max range skew
YEAR 1 88 1971.50 25.55 1971.5 1971.50 32.62 1928 2015 87 0.00
TBONDS 2 82 5.46 8.00 4.0 4.88 5.93 -11 33 44 0.88
SPSTOCK 3 88 11.42 19.85 14.0 12.12 20.76 -44 53 97 -0.38
TBONDS_D 4 82 0.80 0.40 1.0 0.88 0.00 0 1 1 -1.51
SPSTOCK_D 5 88 0.72 0.45 1.0 0.76 0.00 0 1 1 -0.94
kurtosis se
YEAR -1.24 2.72
TBONDS 1.10 0.88
SPSTOCK -0.07 2.12
TBONDS_D 0.29 0.04
SPSTOCK_D -1.13 0.05
Here we can also see, for example, the number of observations per variable (n) and the range (the difference between the minimum and maximum values observed).