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Descriptive terms
Reporting, dashboards and visualization: what happened.
Choropleth map A map where regions are shaded or colored to represent the value of a statistic, such as population density. Cohort analysis Grouping customers by a shared starting point, such as signup month, and tracking how their behavior diverges over time. Cost of living index (COLI) An index comparing the relative cost of a fixed basket of goods and services across different places. Data storytelling Combining data, visuals and narrative so an audience understands an analysis and knows what to do about it. Data visualization Representing data graphically so that patterns, trends and outliers are easier to see than in a table of numbers. Data visualization literacy The ability to accurately read, interpret, and critically evaluate charts and graphs, and to recognize when one is misleading. Dependency ratio The ratio of dependents, children and older adults, to the working-age population, per 100 people. Descriptive analytics Analytics that summarizes what has already happened in the data, without explaining why or predicting what comes next. Fertility rate (total fertility rate, TFR) The average number of children a woman would have in her lifetime at current age-specific birth rates. Gini coefficient A single number, from 0 to 1, measuring income or wealth inequality within a population. House price index (HPI) An index tracking how home prices change over time using repeat sales of the same properties. Housing affordability index An index measuring whether a typical household can afford a typical home in a given housing market. Human Development Index (HDI) A composite index combining life expectancy, education, and income to rank and compare countries' overall development. Interquartile range The range covering the middle 50% of a dataset, from the 25th to the 75th percentile, used to measure spread. Life expectancy The average number of years a person could expect to live given current age-specific mortality rates. Median The middle value of a dataset when sorted from lowest to highest, splitting it into two equal halves. Median household income The income level at which half of households earn more and half earn less, in a given year and place. Moving average A calculated series that averages a fixed window of recent data points, smoothing out short-term noise to reveal a trend. Outlier An observation that differs markedly from the rest of the dataset, either from genuine variation or from an error. Percentile The value below which a given percentage of observations in a dataset fall. Population pyramid A chart showing a population's age and sex distribution, whose shape reveals growth, aging, or decline. Poverty headcount ratio The share of a population living below a defined poverty line, most often expressed as a percentage. Real-world evidence (RWE) Clinical evidence about how a treatment performs, generated from real-world data instead of a controlled trial. Rent burden The share of a renter household's income spent on rent, commonly flagged as burdened above 30 percent. RFM analysis A segmentation technique that scores customers on how recently, how often and how much they buy. Seasonality A regular, predictable pattern in data that repeats at a fixed calendar interval, such as daily, weekly, or annually. Standard deviation A measure of how spread out a set of values is around its mean, expressed in the same units as the data. Vacancy rate The share of housing units that are unoccupied and available, a key gauge of how tight a rental market is. Variance The average of the squared differences between each value and the mean, quantifying spread before returning to original units. Weighted average An average in which some values contribute more to the result than others, based on an assigned weight. Z-score The number of standard deviations a value lies above or below the mean of its distribution.