Descriptive statistics deal with describing a data set. For example, measures of central tendency, such as mean, median and mode; and measures of dispersion, such as variance and standard deviation, are descriptive.
Inferential statistics refers to making inferences. For example, we may wish to infer, based on a sample, whether the true population mean lies within a certain interval, or whether two population means are likely to differ, based on observed differences in sample means.
