Stats breaks x up into separate data sets and then calls describe
to calculate the statistics.
Statistics are found by columns for matrices, by components for a list and
by the relevent groups when a numeric vector and a by vector are given.
The default set of statistics are the number of
(nonmissing) observations, mean, standard deviation, skewness, kurtosis, minimum, lower quartile, median, upper quartile, maximum, and number of missing observations. If any
data set is nonnumeric, missing values are returned for the statistics.
The by argument is a useful way to calculate statistics on parts of a
data set according to different cases.