Types of data

Alright, if you want to be a data scientist, we need to talk about the types of data that you might encounter, how to categorize them, and how you might treat them differently. Let's dive into the different flavors of data you might encounter:

This will seem pretty basic, but we've got to start with the simple stuff and we'll work our way up to the more complicated data mining and machine learning things. It is important to know what kind of data you're dealing with because different techniques might have different nuances depending on what kind of data you're handling. So, there are several flavors of data, if you will, and there are three specific types of data that we will primarily focus on. They are:

• Numerical data
• Categorical data
• Ordinal data

Again, there are different variations of techniques that you might use for different types of data, so you always need to keep in mind what kind of data you're dealing with when you're analyzing it.