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We Can Think of Quantitative Data As Being Either Continuous or Discrete. and Still A Smaller Unit Exists. An Example of This Is The Age of

The document outlines 5 steps for organizing a data analysis process: 1) Ask questions, 2) Wrangle data by gathering, assessing, and cleaning it, 3) Perform exploratory data analysis to find patterns and visualize relationships, 4) Draw conclusions or make predictions using machine learning or statistics, and 5) Communicate results through reports, presentations, or conversations. It then discusses different types of data, categorizing them as quantitative vs categorical, and further dividing quantitative into continuous and discrete and categorical into ordinal and nominal.

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Nezha Lakmassi
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76 views

We Can Think of Quantitative Data As Being Either Continuous or Discrete. and Still A Smaller Unit Exists. An Example of This Is The Age of

The document outlines 5 steps for organizing a data analysis process: 1) Ask questions, 2) Wrangle data by gathering, assessing, and cleaning it, 3) Perform exploratory data analysis to find patterns and visualize relationships, 4) Draw conclusions or make predictions using machine learning or statistics, and 5) Communicate results through reports, presentations, or conversations. It then discusses different types of data, categorizing them as quantitative vs categorical, and further dividing quantitative into continuous and discrete and categorical into ordinal and nominal.

Uploaded by

Nezha Lakmassi
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
You are on page 1/ 3

We organized the data analysis process into five steps: Question, Wrangle, Explore, Draw Conclusions, and Communicate.

Below is a review of the key points.

Step 1: Ask questions


Either you're given data and ask questions based on it, or you ask questions first and gather data based on that later. In
both cases, great questions help you focus on relevant parts of your data and direct your analysis towards meaningful
insights.

Step 2: Wrangle data


You get the data you need in a form you can work with in three steps: gather, assess, clean. You gather the data you need
to answer your questions, assess your data to identify any problems in your data’s quality or structure, and clean your
data by modifying, replacing, or removing data to ensure that your dataset is of the highest quality and as well-structured
as possible.

Step 3: Perform EDA (Exploratory Data Analysis)


You explore and then augment your data to maximize the potential of your analyses, visualizations, and models.
Exploring involves finding patterns in your data, visualizing relationships in your data, and building intuition about what
you’re working with. After exploring, you can do things like remove outliers and create better features from your data,
also known as feature engineering.

Step 4: Draw conclusions (or even make predictions)


This step is typically approached with machine learning or inferential statistics.

Step 5: Communicate your results


You often need to justify and convey meaning in the insights you’ve found. Or, if your end goal is to build a system, you
usually need to share what you’ve built, explain how you reached design decisions, and report how well it performs.
There are many ways to communicate your results: reports, slide decks, blog posts, emails, presentations, or even
conversations. Data visualization will always be very valuable.

 Data Types (Ordinal vs. Nominal)

Categorical Ordinal vs. Categorical Nominal


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).

NEXT

Data Types (Continuous vs. Discrete)

Continuous vs. Discrete

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.

Recap

The table below summarizes our data types. To expand on the information in the table, you can look through the text that
follows.

Data Types

Quantitative: Continuous Discrete

Height, Age, Income Pages in a Book, Trees in Yard, Dogs at a


Coffee Shop

Categorical: Ordinal Nominal

Letter Grade, Survey Gender, Marital Status, Breakfast Items


Rating

Below is a little more detail of the information shared in the above table.

Another Look
To break down our data types, there are two main blocks:

Quantitative and Categorical
Quantitative can be further divided into Continuous or Discrete.
Categorical data can be divided into Ordinal or Nominal.
You should have now mastered what types of data in the world around us falls into each of these four buckets: Discrete,
Continuous, Nominal, and Ordinal. In the next sections, we will work through the numeric summaries that relate
specifically to quantitative variables.

Quantitative vs. Categorical


Some of these can be a bit tricky - notice even though zip codes are a number, they aren’t really a quantitative variable. If
we add two zip codes together, we do not obtain any useful information from this new value. Therefore, this is a
categorical variable.

Height, Age, the Number of Pages in a Book and Annual Income all take on values that we can add, subtract and
perform other operations with to gain useful insight. Hence, these are quantitative.
Gender, Letter Grade, Breakfast Type, Marital Status, and Zip Code can be thought of as labels for a group of items or
individuals. Hence, these are categorical.

Continuous vs. Discrete


To consider if we have continuous or discrete data, we should see if we can split our data into smaller and smaller units.
Consider time - we could measure an event in years, months, days, hours, minutes, or seconds, and even at seconds we
know there are smaller units we could measure time in. Therefore, we know this data type is continuous. Height, age,
and income are all examples of continuous data. Alternatively, the number of pages in a book, dogs I count outside
a coffee shop, or trees in a yard are discrete data. We would not want to split our dogs in half.

Ordinal vs. Nominal


In looking at categorical variables, we found Gender, Marital Status, Zip Code and your Breakfast items are nominal
variables where there is no order ranking associated with this type of data. Whether you ate cereal, toast, eggs, or only
coffee for breakfast; there is no rank ordering associated with your breakfast.
Alternatively, the Letter Grade or Survey Ratings have a rank ordering associated with it, as ordinal data. If you
receive an A, this is higher than an A-. An A- is ranked higher than a B+, and so on... Ordinal variables frequently occur on
rating scales from very poor to very good. In many cases we turn these ordinal variables into numbers, as we can more
easily analyze them, but more on this later!

Final Words
In this section, we looked at the different data types we might work with in the world around us. When we work with data
in the real world, it might not be very clean - sometimes there are typos or missing values. When this is the case, simply
having some expertise regarding the data and knowing the data type can assist in our ability to ‘clean’ this data.
Understanding data types can also assist in our ability to build visuals to best explain the data. But more on this very
soon!

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