- Numerical
This represents some sort of quantitative measurement. Example: height of people, stock price, page load time etc. It can be further broken up into 2 parts:
Discrete data: This is integer based, often counts of some event. Example: “How many songs do a user like?” or “How many times a coin flipped to “head” ?”
Continuous data: It has an infinite number of possible values. Example: “How much time did it take for a user to buy?” - Categorical
This represents qualitative data with no apparent inherent mathematical meaning. Example: Yes or No, Sex, Race, Marital Status etc. These can take be assigned numbers like Yes(0) and No(1), but numbers have no mathematical meaning. - Ordinal
It has features of both numerical and categorical data. But the numbers placed in categories have mathematical meaning. Example: movies rating on 1–5, etc. These values have a mathematical meaning.
Therefore, we tend to overlook this step and jump straight into the water.