Ratio data | Statistics

Ratio data is the highest level of data. Ratio data can be ranked, it is possible to measure the differences between two values and it is meaningful to calculate the ratio between two values of ratio data.

Examples of ratio data are salaries, turnover, weight and height. For ratio data, zero is significant unlike in interval data. Zero for ratio data implies the absence of salary, weight or turnover. For ratio data it is possible to say that a company has a double increase in sales compared with another company. Ratio data are divided into categories that are mutually exclusive and exhaustive.

With mutually exclusive means that an individual, an object or a measurement can not be in more than one category. With exhaustive means that each observation must be in a category, the category 'other' can be added so that all observations can be classified into one category.