Plural of datum. A collection of information or facts. See also information.
- d. adjustment — for useful results data often need to be modified before analysis; for example for age, for sex or for difficulty or for number of attempts.
- d. analysis — submission of data to statistical analysis; includes sorting into categories and determining relationships between variables.
- d. capture — a mechanism for collecting specified segments or categories of data from a stream of automatically recorded data some of which may be irrelevant for the specific purpose.
- categorical d. — are qualitative and suited to classification into categories. Further divisible into nominal (names), ordinal (levels of quality, development), dichotomized (mutually exclusive).
- continuous d. — data which have an infinite number of possible values.
- diagnostic d. — lists of diagnoses and data of clinical signs, clinical pathology results and pathology lesions used in the making of diagnoses.
- dimensional d. — numerical or quantitative data. May be explicit and therefore continuous, or grouped into approximate groups, e.g. nearest whole number, i.e. discrete data.
- discrete d. — data that have finite (usually whole integer) value and therefore fall naturally into groups of similar values; opposite to continuous data.
- incidence d. — data related to the occurrence of specific disease incidents.
- non-normal d. — data whose frequency distribution is markedly different to that of normal data (see below).
- normal d. — data which manifests graphically as a bell-shaped curve distributed symmetrically about the peak value.
- ordinal d. — a type of data containing limited categories with a ranking from the lowest to the highest, e.g. very mild, moderate, severe.
- paired d. — see paired data.
- passive d. — data acquired from records collected for some other purpose.
- pre-existing d. — data in existence before the commencement of a study. Of limited value unless they are exactly the data required, have been collected adequately, and a group of pre-existing controls with their corresponding data can be identified.
- prevalence d. — disease occurrences are recorded against the size of the population at risk at the time.
- raw d. — data as they are collected and before any calculation, ordering, etc. has been done.
- screening d. — data obtained by periodic diagnostic testing of randomly selected samples of a population.
- secondary d. — the use of data for purposes other than that for which it was intended.
- sentinel d. — data collected from sentinel animals or other recording units.
