Descriptive statistics in R Programming - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Descriptive statistics

📖 Scenario: You work as a data analyst for a small company. You have collected sales data for a week and want to understand the basic statistics like average sales, minimum, maximum, and total sales.

🎯 Goal: Build a simple R script that calculates descriptive statistics (mean, min, max, sum) for daily sales data.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a numeric vector with exact daily sales values

Create a variable to hold the number of days

Calculate mean, minimum, maximum, and total sales using built-in R functions

Print the results clearly

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Descriptive statistics help summarize and understand data quickly in many fields like business, healthcare, and research.

💼 Career

Data analysts and scientists use these basic statistics daily to report insights and make decisions.

1

Create the sales data vector

Create a numeric vector called daily_sales with these exact values: 150, 200, 170, 220, 180, 210, 190.

R Programming

# Create the daily_sales vector with the exact values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the c() function to create a vector with the given numbers.

2

Create a variable for the number of days

Create a variable called num_days that stores the length of the daily_sales vector using the length() function.

R Programming

daily_sales <- c(150, 200, 170, 220, 180, 210, 190)
# Create num_days using length() on daily_sales
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use length(daily_sales) to find how many days of sales data you have.

3

Calculate descriptive statistics

Calculate the mean, minimum, maximum, and total sales from daily_sales and store them in variables called avg_sales, min_sales, max_sales, and total_sales respectively. Use the functions mean(), min(), max(), and sum().

R Programming

daily_sales <- c(150, 200, 170, 220, 180, 210, 190)
num_days <- length(daily_sales)
# Calculate avg_sales, min_sales, max_sales, total_sales
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use the built-in R functions to calculate each statistic and assign them to the correct variable names.

4

Print the descriptive statistics

Print the values of avg_sales, min_sales, max_sales, and total_sales each on a new line with descriptive text using the print() function.

R Programming

daily_sales <- c(150, 200, 170, 220, 180, 210, 190)
num_days <- length(daily_sales)
avg_sales <- mean(daily_sales)
min_sales <- min(daily_sales)
max_sales <- max(daily_sales)
total_sales <- sum(daily_sales)
# Print all four statistics with descriptive text
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use print(paste("Text", variable)) to show descriptive text and the value on the same line.