Data Types
Explore the fundamental data types used in data science to prepare for cleaning and analyzing datasets. Understand numerical and categorical data, including discrete, continuous, ordinal, and nominal types. Learn how to identify these types using pandas for better data preprocessing and analysis.
Introduction to Data types
Data is basically raw information. It can be in any form. We will look at data from the perspective of a data scientist who is going to clean and analyze the data. We need to know in what form the data is present to analyze it properly and apply different statistical methods on it. To a data scientist, data can take two basic forms:
- Numerical
- Categorical
Numerical data
Numerical data is data that has some meaning as a measurement, such as the height of a person, the price of a product, the IQ of a person, the number of lessons in this course, etc. It is also known as Quantitative Data. It can be broken down into two types.
1. Discrete data
Discrete data is data that can take separate and distinct values. It can take only a certain number of values. It cannot be divided into smaller meaningful parts. For instance, the ...