For the three images below we determine and describe why each one is either Descriptive, Inferential, and Predictive.

This first set of graphs are all Descriptive. The pie chart depicts the distribution of the categories Yellow, Green, and Red in a given population. The bar chart depicts the number of each color category, the histogram shows the number of elements broken out from ages 20 through 27, and the line chart shows the number of new freshman each year between 1994 and 2006. All three are different ways to describe and visually depict measured quantities or events.

This figure is Predictive as it shows scores for three projects over time from left to right and then at the far right of the chart seeks to project the scores into the future. This chart aims to use some type of analytics to predict future scores based on some unspecified inputs. Linear regressions are the most common form of prediction or forecasting, a family of techniques that typically seeks to fit a line with a slope to the known measured data in order to predict the future values.

This final visualization is inferential as it is drawing from results sampled from a population in order to assess the opinions of the population as a whole. It is often not possible to measure the opinions of an entire population and in cases where it may be possible to measure an entire population it is often more effective and suitably accurate to take a smaller sample of the population instead of trying to measure the entirety.