Plenty of Data Types in the Sea
Brief intro to data types in general.
The most fundamental knowledge you need is of data types. Without this understand you will certainly be confused while trying to learn anything in the field of analytics.
Luckily they are pretty easy to understand and commit to memory. Data types a broken out into 2 different categories — numeric and categorical.
Numerical Data Types
Let’s start with numeric data types — numbers, everyone’s favorite topic!! Numeric data types are expressed on a numerical scale, obviously.
What might not be so obvious is that there are two subcategories, which are continuous and discrete.
Continuous numeric data is data that can take on any value in an interval. Think height, weight, length, and temperature can all be expressed in a continuous numerical scale. It is continuous because you can be 56 inches tall, and you can also 56.123452424245 inches tall. Same thing with the other example. This data can usually be rounded and still mean the same thing.
The other subcategory is discrete numeric data. This type of data can only take on integer values. This is typically counts like number of people in a class, shoe size, numbers of cars sold. You can have 10 people in a class, but you really can’t have 10.4324 people in a class. And likewise you really can’t round this data and still have it make sense.
Let’s switch gears and move away from numbers slightly.
Categorical Data Types
While this tour of data can have number too, you will usually see this is some sort of order or in more of a binary form.
If the above statement doesn’t really make sense, don’t worry, I’ll unpack it.
Ordinal data is the first we will go through. This is data that has an explicit ordering to it. What that means is small comes before medium which comes before large. Super simple!
Nominal data almost exactly like ordinal data, the only kicker is there is no order to it. An example would be color of t-shirts you own or different types of noodles that exist. It would be silly for either of those to have an order, hence why they are still categorical data, just not ordinal.
Now there is a special case of nominal data types called binary. These are special in a sense that there can only be 2 options such as male/female, 0/1, true/false, etc.
Thats all for a brief introduction into the general structure of types of data. Thanks for reading!
