Descriptive statistics provides a variety of functions to statistically analyze and explore a Teradata database. Descriptive statistical analysis is valuable for several reasons:
- It provides business insight.
- It uncovers data quality issues, which, if not corrected or compensated for, would jeopardize the accuracy of analytic models based on the data.
- It isolates the data used in building analytic models. For example, outlying values should sometimes be excluded from a model; in other cases, these values might be required to solve a particular business problem.
- Some statistical processes used in analytic modeling require a certain type of data distribution. Descriptive statistical analysis can help determine the suitability of various data elements for model input and can suggest transformations that may be required.