Descriptive Statistics I

03 Data types

Quantitative and Categorical.

Quantitative data takes on numeric values that allow us to perform mathematical operations (like the number of dogs).

We can think of quantitative data as being either continuous or discrete.

Continuous data can be split into smaller and smaller units, and still a smaller unit exists. An example of this is the age of the dog - we can measure the units of the age in years, months, days, hours, seconds, but there are still smaller units that could be associated with the age.

Discrete data only takes on countable values. The number of dogs we interact with is an example of a discrete data type.

Categorical are used to label a group or set of items (like dog breeds - Collies, Labs, Poodles, etc.).

We can divide categorical data further into two types: Ordinal and Nominal.

Categorical Ordinal data take on a ranked ordering (like a ranked interaction on a scale from Very Poor to Very Good with the dogs).

Categorical Nominal data do not have an order or ranking (like the breeds of the dog).