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Attribute Types

• Nominal: categories, states, or “names of things”
• Hair_color = {auburn, black, blond, brown, grey, red, white}
• marital status, occupation, ID numbers, zip codes
• Binary
• Nominal attribute with only 2 states (0 and 1)
• Symmetric binary: both outcomes equally important
• e.g., gender
• Asymmetric binary: outcomes not equally important.
• e.g., medical test (positive vs. negative)
• Convention: assign 1 to most important outcome (e.g., HIV positive)
• Ordinal
• Values have a meaningful order (ranking) but magnitude between successive values is not known.
• Size = {small, medium, large}, grades, army rankings