Chapter 1 : Types of data

Data is, what we call in normal parlance, facts and figures that we come across everyday in
newspapers, books, TV channels and the net.
Broadly, data can be classified as qualitative data and quantitative data. In any data, we have
something, called as an attribute or property or characteristic.
In the case of quantitative data, we can measure the attribute and also the number of units
having the attribute. We can take the example of an attribute like marks or income or heights.
We can measure the marks and also the number of students having so much marks.
Marks Number of students
45 5
56 10
67 2
Here marks is the attribute and number of students is called as the frequency (f). The above
table is called as a frequency table.
In the case of qualitative data, we cannot measure the attribute but we can only measure the
number of units having the attribute. We can take the example of an attribute like
specialisation or department or gender or occupation. Here specialisation has a number of
categories which cannot be given a numerical value but we can measure the number of
students belonging to each specialisation.
Specialisation Number of students
Marketing 25
Finance 20
HR 5
Systems 5
Operations 5
Here specialisation is the attribute and number of students is the frequency (f).
Quantitative data can be further classified as discrete data and continuous data. In the case of
discrete data, the attribute takes only whole number values and every unit is a separate entity
in