Data Types and Information: Beyond the Current Practice of Data Analysis

The role of “scaling” is to upgrade given measurement, for instance, from nominal to interval, thereby affording added accuracy of derived measurement. The higher-level measurement, however, imposes greater restrictions on what one can do with it. Thus, the present study discusses the opposite process, that is, downgrading (or desensitizing) of high- level measurement, say from interval to nominal, and let a scaling procedure upgrade it again so that in the process of upgrading one may capture not only linear relations but also nonlinear relations from less restricted measurement. How much more information is captured by this process is not certain, but one attempt is presented together with two numerical examples of the process.