Types of data¶

Major types of data¶

• Numerical
  • Represents some sort of quantitative measurement like page load times, stock prices etc.
  • Discrete data - integer based, often counts of some event.
  • Continuous data
    • How much time did it take for a user to check out?
• Categorical
  • Qualitative data that has no inherent mathematical meaning
    • Gender, Yes/no, race, state of residence, product category etc
  • You can assign numbers to categories in order to represent them more compactly, but the numbers don't have mathematical meaning.
• Ordinal
  • A mixture of numerical and categorical
  • Categorical data that has a mathematical meaning
  • Example: movie ratings on 1-5 scale.
    • Ratings must be 1, 2, 3, 4 or 5
    • But these values have mathematical meaning - 1 means it's a worse movie than 2.