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Level of measurement or scale of measure is a classification that describes the nature of information within the values assigned to variables. [1] Psychologist Stanley Smith Stevens developed the best-known classification with four levels, or scales, of measurement: nominal , ordinal , interval , and ratio .
The concept of data type is similar to the concept of level of measurement, but more specific. For example, count data requires a different distribution (e.g. a Poisson distribution or binomial distribution) than non-negative real-valued data require, but both fall under the same level of measurement (a ratio scale).
Ordinal data is a categorical, statistical data type where the variables have natural, ordered categories and the distances between the categories are not known. [1]: 2 These data exist on an ordinal scale, one of four levels of measurement described by S. S. Stevens in 1946.
For ordinal variables the median can be calculated as a measure of central tendency and the range (and variations of it) as a measure of dispersion. For interval level variables, the arithmetic mean (average) and standard deviation are added to the toolbox and, for ratio level variables, we add the geometric mean and harmonic mean as measures ...
Some types of normalization involve only a rescaling, to arrive at values relative to some size variable. In terms of levels of measurement, such ratios only make sense for ratio measurements (where ratios of measurements are meaningful), not interval measurements (where only distances are meaningful, but not ratios).
The adjacent image shows scatter plots of Anscombe's quartet, a set of four different pairs of variables created by Francis Anscombe. [23] The four variables have the same mean (7.5), variance (4.12), correlation (0.816) and regression line (= +). However, as can be seen on the plots, the distribution of the variables is very different.
For two qualitative variables (nominal or ordinal in level of measurement), a contingency table can be used to view the data, and a measure of association or a test of independence could be used. [3] If the variables are quantitative, the pairs of values of these two variables are often represented as individual points in a plane using a ...
The study and measurement of relationships; Probability computations of multidimensional regions; The exploration of data structures and patterns; Multivariate analysis can be complicated by the desire to include physics-based analysis to calculate the effects of variables for a hierarchical "system-of-systems".