Question

What is a Data?

What is a quantitative data?

What are various other forms of Data?

*ON SHEETS, HANDWRITTEN

* REFERENCES

Answer 1

Data is facts and statistics collected together for reference or analysis

The quantities, characters, or symbols on which operations are performed by a computer, which may be stored and transmitted in form of electrical signals and recorded on magnetic, optical or mechanical recording media

Accounting Data is all the information and data contained in journals, ledgers and other records that support financial statements, eg spreadsheets. It may be in computer readable form or On paper,

Quantitative data is any data that can be represented and measured numerically. For a variable to be quantitative it must have numerical values

Quantitative data is easier to measure and study than qualitative data since numeric values are easier to analyze. The advantages of quantitative data is that it can be objectively measured and presented and it explains the observed phenomena more accurately since numerical values are obtained through systematic process of observation and recording, not appreciations or opinions

Quantitative data serves the statistical purpose of representing volumes, frequencies, number of appearances and values of the variables being obsvered. With quantitative data, objective trends can be identified to develop projectns and statistical forecasting models.

Example

The finance manager of a company called xyz come a company that produces sugar for retail and commercial clients is interested in finding out the current price trend of some of the most common raw materials the company employs for its manufacturing processes. The manager gathered a team of two of his best analysts to research historical prices from the last 10 years to understand how the market has behaved for each of commodities he selected.

In order to fulfill this task, the analysts must gather the quantitative data to develop some analytics. The manager asked for avereages., seasonality and drivers for each of these commodities in order to get a better grasp of how the market looks like for each of them so he can develop some forecasting models for planning purposes.

Here are types of ddata

Continuous Data:Continuous data is of the type that must be measured as against the type that we can count.

Discrete Data:Discrete data is data that needs to be counted as opposed to being measured

Binary:The data in such cases needs to be entered in one of two categories like true or false. Many times the outcomes of success and failure determine the operations of the shop floor. It is in such cases that binary discrete category comes in handy.

Ordered Categories:The data in these cases needs to be entered in one of multiple categories that are ranked .Here there may be more than two categories. In fact there usually are more than two categories involved. The categories may be based on relative importance or some type of number scale.

Unordered Categories The data in these cases is entered in one of the multiple categories that need not be ranked There are usually more than two categories. Data lying in one category is usually no different from data lying in any other category,

Count:This is simple counting of data without any categorization involved. This represents the discrete variables in its truest form but is rarely used in the six sigma process because it does not provide much analytical Insight into the variables being studied.