There are also statistical methods that refrain from the use of a particular model, by focusing exclusively on the data or by generalizing over all possible models.  Some of these techniques are properly localized in descriptive statistics: they do not concern an inference from data but merely serve to describe the data in a particular way. Statistical methods that do not rely on an explicit model choice have unfortunately not attracted much attention in the philosophy of statistics, but for completeness sake they will be briefly discussed here.