Scale of Measurement

A measured variable in a data can be classified among 4 measurement scale.

Nominal Scale: As name suggest this scale is related to different names of categories. This measurement scale is basically  used to define non ordered levels or types of a categorical variable.These levels have no preference one over other. 

Example: Gender, Vehicle-type, Blood Group etc. 

Ordinal Scale: This scale has a set preference of one level or category over other, but it can not be put this measurement into any number, i.e. one level is different from other by what value. The ordered levels have a definite pattern.

Example: Grades, Travel Class, etc. 

Interval Scale: In this scale every observed value can be expressed in terms of numbers. This is a big relief, as since now we were just talking of levels & orders. The scale have a property of equal interval, but no scope of a reference i.e. 'a true zero'. This means you can add or subtract but can't do multiplication or division.

Let's elaborate with an example. Consider a compressed air application, if air is having 4 bar g pressure, you can increase the pressure by 5 bar g to make it a 9 bar g pressure. This is a simple increment and no. adds up. But we can never say that an 8 bar g pressure is twice high pressure as compared to 4 bar g. So this scale has an additive property.

Also if we say that vacuum has a zero pressure, still we can measure it and will not say an absence of pressure as there are concept of negative pressure also.

Example: Pressure, Temperature etc.

Ratio Scale: This is a measurement which has equal interval as well as a  reference of 'true zero'. This scale is placed at the top of measurement scale, as it possess all the properties of measurement. Best example for this weight scale, as it has a measurement of  0 lbs as true zero and we can't have negative weights.

Example: Height, weight.

Below is an example of all the scales in data collection process.

Types of Data

After conducting a research or gathering data from a legitimate source  a data scientist come across a slew of data which are collected from different source & measured on different scales.

This data can be classified..

..Based on Data Source:

The data can be classified as primary or secondary data based on the type of source. 

Primary Data: A primary data is collected from a survey, or focus group interviews,  POS etc. The survey or questionnaire is designed by researcher himself. Hence data collected is very relevant & to-the-point of research objectives.

Secondary Data: While a secondary  data is collected from the legitimate sources like internet sources (like Plunkett research, Business reporter etc) government census, S&P's industry surveys. white books etc, This data is being prepared for general purpose & it sometimes does not make any sense to research objectives, but gives an idea about the macro-environment of the  research study, This data is used as reference in further study.

..Based on Data Type:

When looking at type of data, it can be classified as numeric or categorical data. 

Numeric Data: As name suggest, it comprise of all type of numbers. These data is generally further sub-classified as Continuous data & discrete data. 

Continuous variable is one which can assume any value like 3.45, 12, 6.57e-2 etc. some of the examples are temperature, sensex, etc.

Discrete variable can take particular values as whole numbers. This is most of the time is count and frequency data. 

Categorical Data: A categorical variable can take values which are generally categories, as an example "type of vehicle" is a category & can take values as 2-wheeler, car, heavy vehicle etc. These are the attributes which are further used to sub-classify the data. Sometimes this data can also carry a preference or order attached to each category. Like, the graduation results which are defined on grades as A+, A, B+, B, etc. where a definite order of grade can be assumed. Such as, A+ is better than A, while A is better than B+ and so on.

Statistical Analysis - An introduction

Statistics is a science, that helps in interpreting, understanding, presenting a large volume of numerical and categorical data. It is a measure to calculate various parameters and statistic which will represent the data as a whole. Now why is it required, why not to use complete series of numbers collected by either researchers through a survey or terabytes of data gathered by machines?

Answer lies within the question. This data is humongous & it is difficult to analyze the whole data simultaneously. Hence a researcher or data scientist requires best representation of this very large collection of numbers, this is where statistics come into picture & gives an over-all idea about this "data" of  central tendencies by mean, median, mode & spread or distribution by variance or standard deviation.

This useful calculated values are information generated out of the data. How is this information going to benefit a data scientist, & whether it is going to have any "significance" over the statistic of the complete data. Enter the Analysis part of the process. Analysis is using data information & turning them into useful insights which are not visible otherwise. This is generally being supplemented by a data scientist's own knowledge about the subject & hypothesis tests.

Let's take an Example!!

We have a small data of class -V students & this data comprises of

No. of students : 60

Male students : 38

Female students : 22

Student ID	Gender	Height (in cm)	Weight (in kg)	Grade
1	Male	78	33	C
2	Female	78	31	A+
3	Female	103	35	C
4	Female	71	37	C
5	Female	84	28	A
6	Male	104	34	C
7	Male	85	30	B+
8	Male	103	28	A+
9	Male	66	38	C
10	Female	90	40	F
11	Male	108	29	B
12	Female	110	28	A+
13	Female	108	40	A
14	Male	78	36	B+
15	Male	106	30	A
16	Male	91	45	F
17	Male	85	36	A+
18	Male	104	41	F
19	Male	73	42	A+
20	Male	89	32	B
21	Female	74	33	F
22	Male	91	30	A
23	Male	66	43	F
24	Male	104	42	A
25	Male	113	42	B
26	Male	89	42	B+
27	Male	98	37	B+
28	Female	99	34	B+
29	Male	76	42	B
30	Female	71	35	A
31	Male	82	38	B
32	Female	69	38	B
33	Female	85	37	A+
34	Female	69	40	A
35	Female	75	43	C
36	Male	109	28	B
37	Female	73	29	B
38	Male	72	40	B
39	Male	111	40	A+
40	Male	106	33	F
41	Female	115	44	A+
42	Female	68	35	F
43	Female	73	30	A
44	Male	90	37	B
45	Female	66	42	A
46	Male	114	40	B
47	Male	108	28	A
48	Female	107	33	A
49	Male	69	31	A+
50	Male	117	44	B+
51	Male	94	42	F
52	Male	109	35	A
53	Male	92	30	A
54	Male	82	37	A+
55	Female	82	30	B
56	Male	66	36	B
57	Female	105	44	A+
58	Male	88	39	B+
59	Male	83	43	A
60	Male	77	28	C

             

This data is about student's height in cm, weight in kg, & last year's grade.

Now if we say that mean height of female students is 85.2 cm & those of male students is 91.2 cm,  

it means that these mean values are single no. representations of heights for both female & male populations respectively.

While if we compare the height means for both female & male students, we find out that height of female students is lesser than the male students for class-V. Now this is an insight that we could draw looking at the mean values of the data. Let's keep it this way until we reach forthcoming topic of hypothesis testing.

A question may arises why can't we go for one to one comparison of data. Answer is simple & straight, it can be done by creating a cross table for male and female students & then further analyzing the outcomes. This is easier said than done for a large data having millions of observations over numerous variables.

This sets our stage to a further go for a complete series of data analysis & statistical approach. We will next discuss about various components of data.

>>This series of blog is an attempt to debunk the various concepts of  statistical analysis in a simpler way. We hope it is of some help to you guys in getting the things right.

Ethics and marketing go hand in hand

Today i was treveling through humble but jam packed BEST bus, these advertisement plackards pasted on the upper side of the windows caught my attention inadvertently. There is nothing new in their format , but this time they are carrying message which was subtle but important. One message reads Please check carefully beneath your seat before seating and carrying a toll-free no.. The important thing to note is this message is from a mobile phone company and the othee one from a FMCG company.

Welcome to era of ethical marketing!!

This trend is not new but is being used extensively these days by marketers. Whether it is Save tiger campaign of Aircel or Save trees use mobile phone campaign of Idea, everyone wants to associate itself with a social cause or other. Few days back Idea came for earth hour campaign when it appealed to turn off lights for an hour to cut the Carbon emmission of the World , then came its campaign that was related to the Public security where they talked about donating all the money of usage to a charity for the victims of 26/11 attack.
The same thing was tried by Times of India when they came with Lead India campaign and talked about the corrupt political structure of the country. HT never left back and came with a campaign of ethical reporting.
Way back in 2003 Surf excel brought about a new by saying

"Do bucket Pani Ab Rojana hai Bachana". & then many companies started making ads with social messages. Idea with "What an Idea sirji " campaign gve it a new direction.

Every brand has started to make its way to the minds of customers by portraying themselves as their well wisher, some one who cares for them in true sense. HT came up with NO TV DAY in mumbai to give human relationship more importance & Earth Day doesn't need any introduction

Hoping to see a lot more in coming years!!

Browse the World through me!! not them..

Looking to browse the whole hoards of information, now you have got options Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Apple Safari, AOL Explorer, Netscape!! etc. etc.
But war begun in earlier 90's with the advent of WWW an hypertext based system. Netscape came with Netscape nevigator and dominated market at that time but soon Microsoft arrived in the market with it's Internet Explorer 2.0. But internet explorer was available for free!!

During 90's many new versions were launched in the market but they were just bug fixes most of time. But competition become sour when Microsoft internet explorer 4.0 was released. The release party in San Francisco featured a ten-foot-tall letter "e" logo. Netscape employees showing up to work the following morning found that giant logo on their front lawn, with a sign attached which read "From the IE team." The message also read "We Love You." The Netscape employees promptly knocked it over and set a giant figure of their dinosaur Mozilla mascot atop it, holding a sign reading "Netscape 72, Microsoft 18". This worsened the Browser war when Microsoft integrated it's Internet explorer which was widely criticised by browser industry, because acc. to them it would made IE as monopolistic as compatible platform with the then widely used Windows OS. They were not wrong though their speculation became truth and Internet explorer 5.0 & 6.0 became synonymous with web browser for next whole decade.

But now the internet explorer is getting serious threats from various enriched Web browsers!
like they give you facility to return back to the same browsed pages if browser shut down accidently or spellcheckers or options to clear your private data before you even open your browser. Opera's one of the most interesting features is the speed dial feature.that means once you add speed dial to a website, you can simply type in the number of that website in order to access it. If you ever forget what numbers are assigned to which websites, all you you have to do is open a tab and it will give you the speed dial screen. Another feature that comes in handy is the thumbnail feature with regards to tabs. All the user needs to do is to place your cursor over the tabs and a small screen will pop up and give you a miniature version of what is in that tab.

On 17 June 2008, Mozilla released Firefox 3.0 which added a new layout, bug fixes . It also included separate themes for different operating systems and a redesigned download manager.

Google released an open source browser called Google Chrome for Microsoft Windows on December 11, 2008, using the same WebKit rendering engine as Safari and claiming a faster JavaScript engine called V8.

Mac OS X and Linux versions are under development. Chrome had a 1.4% usage share by April 2009.

Shrinking market sour toothed microsoft so on March 19, 2009, they released Internet Explorer 8 which added accelerators, improved privacy protection, and a compatibility mode for pages designed for Internet Explorer 7.

NetApplications also reported that, as of April 2009, Internet Explorer had a 66% market share, compared with Firefox's 22% and Safari's 8%, leaving Chrome, Opera and all the others sharing the remaining 4%.In 2009 both Safari and Firefox released versions with advanced Java script Engines

On June 13, 2009 Mozilla released version 3.5 of Firefox which added web standards improvements in the Gecko layout engine.This multi polarisation of browser market has opened the gates for new innovatons and developments in the browser market and giving user a new level of browsing the world.

Big Brands on the moVe!!!

On 29 th June, Tata unveiled its two newly acquired brands! Jaguar, and The Land Rover
Tata when acquired these brands last year, they made it clear not to launch these brands hastily then what happened now?? When every automobile segment is worst hit why is it need now?
The reason is Indian market of b-segment car market is rising rapidly and is supposed to leave Japan in dust in coming 10 years, which is second largest market of these B-segment luxury cars after China. When Europe & American customer are settling themselves with lower segment cars. while Brazil,Russia, and China are having high demands of Luxury cars!!

Indian market today sees a sale of around 10,000 cars in this premium segment which scores of around 400 Crore. Tata wagon will again ride on trust and faith the brand generated in Indian market. Although these brands will be sold on their names. So Tata's decision to roll out big names noe is truly justified. Although Tata has kept the assembling plant abroad and has no plans to bring it to India soon.
Jaguar will be competing with already established brands in market like Mercedes, Nissan, Volvo, Audi & BMW.
"The luxury-car market in India is very small, but there is a huge opportunity there," notes Jaguar Land Rover chief executive David Smith.
"We expect it to grow fast over the next 5-10 years."

Eveready LED commercial

'Give me Red' says a commercial in the early 90's of last century and positioned itself as one of the well known brand of yester years. The company is back again with a bang and a brand new condept of Pikapika which means light painting. With declining market of dry batteries, the young generations are slowly forgetting dry batteries these days. The market needed an eye catching add after long duration of 5 years. Y&R Rediffusion has done a great job with this advertisements!!

The aim of the advertisement is to use all the equipments which run on dry battery.So Shivaji Dasgupta branch manager Rediffusion Y&R Kolkatta decided to use a digital camera and led flairs that work entirely on the high strength batteries!! To clearly state this message, when ad begins there comes a caption stating that all equipments are working on high strength Eveready Ultima battery. Good attempt to connect with the target audience that is youth.

Stating views of bigwigs of advertising industry:

Naren Multani, films division head, McCann Erickson, says, “The execution route taken by Eveready has an uncanny resemblance to the Sprint Ahead commercial.”

Sainath Chowdhary of Corcoise has already approved the purpose of advertisements although he is bit skeptic about the story told in advertisements and says that message can be shown in some better way though.

Naresh Gupta of publicis says that the advertisments lacks a story to tell and it implored two message in it. First the basic give me red message and second that now eveready has a battery with more power.

Although sprint already used same approach to promote it's new range of product. So concept is not new but its introduction to indian market. All we hope to see some more pikapika & innovative promotions form Eveready!!