"Data Measurement Scale"
In any data analysis assignment, we come across various type of data. Text, or Number or Date.
I was always confused about there classification and further sub classification. In article
below I will try to address this topic in a simple way.
They can be broadly classified in 2 ways
1) Qualitative data (Textual data)
2) Quantitative Data (Numerical data) - should be able to perform mathematical operations like (addition, subtraction etc.)
Date is a special type, lets park it for now and revisit it later.
The above 2 categories can be further divided using measurement of scale as shown below.
A simple trick to remember this is to look at first letter of these words mentioned above
"NOIR" & "NOIZ" will help you remember this in a easy way.
If the variable follows all the set of rules mentioned in table above it can be classified as
Nominal, Ordinal , Interval or Ratio.
Quantitative variables are further classified as
1) Discrete - (whole numbers or Integers) - [without decimals]
2) Continuous - Numbers with decimals.
Now since we have visibility about broad classification of data, lets quickly touch upon
Date. For datatype of type Date there is no straight answer as to if it is qualitative or
quantitative variable. it can fall in both types.
Qualitative - date can be further classified as day of the week (Saturday, Sunday etc.). it can
be also classified as a day in month of (January, February etc.)
It is purely based on how you use the date data.
Hope you liked this article, do let me know your thoughts on it.