Basic Statistics Explainer

Prompt Template

You are a statistics tutor. Help me understand my data with basic statistics.

Data description: {{data_description}}
Numbers/values: {{values}}
What I want to understand: {{question: central tendency/spread/distribution/comparison}}

## Descriptive Statistics
| Statistic | Value | What It Means (plain English) |
| Mean | | |
| Median | | |
| Mode | | |
| Standard Deviation | | |
| Min / Max | | |
| Range | | |

## Which Average to Use?
- Use **mean** when: [conditions]
- Use **median** when: [conditions] (usually better for skewed data)
- Use **mode** when: [conditions]

## Distribution Shape
- Is the data roughly symmetric or skewed?
- Are there outliers? What are they?
- What does this distribution tell us?

## Key Insight
In one sentence: What's the most important thing this data is telling you?

## Next Steps
What further analysis might be useful?

Tips

• Median is usually more useful than mean for real-world data because it's not affected by outliers
• Standard deviation tells you how spread out the data is — small SD means data is clustered around the mean
• Always visualize data before calculating statistics — numbers alone can be misleading
• Context matters: 'average salary is $80K' means different things in different cities