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Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning. I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represente
by avs733 7y ago
Simple...data representation is not the same as data meaning.
I teach an introductory stats course and we hammer this in. Categorical data are often represented as numbers or other short indicators for storage purposes. Typically I fmultiple choice the encoding is by the order of the choice options.
I not infrequently see average of gender because male = 0 and female = 1 or vice versa and someone generates a table without thinking.
- shriphani 7y agoThe bigger issue here seems to be the use of ordinals in the data collection process. For instance, a lot of my CSVs don't have them and R and pandas are perfectly capable of enumerating. Why do you even need to put ordinals in the dataset? Does excel want this sort of thing or something?
- avs733 7y agoYour don't need to people just do... I've kinda always assumed or connects to olden days and efficient storage and memory use. Male is a four character string, 1 is an integer.
- LorenPechtel 7y agoAha! Now we see why there are so many transgendered people these days! :):):)