nominal

(adjective)

Having values whose order is insignificant.

Related Terms

Examples of nominal in the following topics:

  • Collecting and Measuring Data

    • There are four main levels of measurement: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
    • There are four main levels of measurement used in statistics: nominal, ordinal, interval, and ratio.
    • Nominal measurements have no meaningful rank order among values.
    • Nominal data differentiates between items or subjects based only on qualitative classifications they belong to.
    • Distinguish between the nominal, ordinal, interval and ratio methods of data measurement.

  • Averages of Qualitative and Ranked Data

    • Stevens proposed his typology in a 1946 Science article entitled "On the Theory of Scales of Measurement. " In that article, Stevens claimed that all measurement in science was conducted using four different types of scales that he called "nominal", "ordinal", "interval" and "ratio", unifying both qualitative (which are described by his "nominal" type) and quantitative (to a different degree, all the rest of his scales).
    • The nominal scale differentiates between items or subjects based only on their names and/or categories and other qualitative classifications they belong to.
    • The mode, i.e. the most common item, is allowed as the measure of central tendency for the nominal type.
    • On the other hand, the median, i.e. the middle-ranked item, makes no sense for the nominal type of data since ranking is not allowed for the nominal type.

  • Benefits

    • To the extent to which actual probability values differ from nominal probability values, the actual probability values tend to be higher than the nominal p values.
    • Although this sounds like a good thing because the Type I error rate is lower than the nominal rate, it has a serious downside: reduced power.

  • Types of Variables

    • Categorical variables may be further described as ordinal or nominal.
    • A nominal variable is a categorical variable.
    • Examples of nominal categorical variables include sex, business type, eye colour, religion and brand.
    • Variables can be numeric or categorial, being further broken down in continuous and discrete, and nominal and ordinal variables.
    • Distinguish between quantitative and categorical, continuous and discrete, and ordinal and nominal variables.

  • Measures of Variability of Qualitative and Ranked Data

    • An index of qualitative variation (IQV) is a measure of statistical dispersion in nominal distributions--or those dealing with qualitative data.
    • The variation ratio is a simple measure of statistical dispersion in nominal distributions.
    • Assess the use of IQV in measuring statistical dispersion in nominal distributions

  • 3D Plots

    • A fourth dimension can be represented as long as it is represented as a nominal variable.

  • Levels of Measurement

    • When measuring using a nominal scale, one simply names or categorizes responses.
    • Gender, handedness, favorite color, and religion are examples of variables measured on a nominal scale.
    • The essential point about nominal scales is that they do not imply any ordering among the responses.
    • Nominal scales embody the lowest level of measurement.
    • This is what distinguishes ordinal from nominal scales.

  • Comparing Two Populations: Paired Difference Experiment

    • McNemar's test is a normal approximation used on nominal data.

  • Median

    • The median cannot be identified for categorical nominal data, as it cannot be logically ordered.

  • Two-Way ANOVA