A nominal number names something-a telephone number, a player on a team. Nominal numbers do not show quantity or rank. They are used only to identify something.
Here are some examples using nominal numbers:
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Nominal values are the values that a component is specified to be. For example, the nominal value of a 10K resistor is 10K. Its actual value may vary, though, based on its tolerance.
The 12 percent nominal interest means that your money will increase in value by 12% in a year's time in NOMINAL terms.However, the inflation rate of 13 percent says that the cost of goods will increase faster than the value of your deposit.Hence the REAL effect is that the value of your money will fall by 1 percent.
The whole point of a nominal variable is that is has no numerical value associated with it. With a binary measure you can allocated the values 1 and 0 or +1 and -1 for observations where the attribute is present or absent. If there are more than 2 values that the nominal variable can take then you can allocate any numbers that you want but in all cases the numbers do not have a value: they are simply symbols which can help for sorting and for binary comparisons.
It depends on how the variable is used. At its simplest, it would be a nominal or categorical value but, if used as part of a time series, it would be an ordinal variable.
One possible opposite of a numerical scale is a "nominal" scale. In the study of statistics, we use four "scales of measurement": nominal; ordinal; interval; ratio. The "nominal," scale, which simply names categories, is, in a sense, non-numerical. On "nominal" scales, people or objects with the same attribute are assigned the same scale-value. Examples of categories on nominal scales are ethnicity, gender, marital status, styles of housing, models of cars. For example, a nominal scale of "marital status" might be numbered as follows: 1. Single, never married. 2. Single, previously married. 3. Married. Although we may count the number of people (or items) in each category, the numerals assigned to the "nominal" scale have no 'numeric' meaning in the way that we usually think about numbers. On that view, a nominal scale may be said to be non-numerical and, therefore, the opposite of a numerical scale. Actually, integers form a subset of numbers, not the other way around.