A simple and systematic way of displaying both categorical and numerical data is a frequency table. A frequency table is a two column listing of variables and the frequency of the occurrence of the variables it takes in a particular data set.

## Numerical Example

For example, the number of cars in a neighbourhood of 10 households are recorded as follows.

${1,1,1,2,2,2,3,3,4,4}$

You can represent this data using a frequency table as shown below:

 Number of Cars Frequency 1 3 2 3 3 2 4 2 Total 10

You’ll notice that the number of cars acts as a variable in the left column and the number of times it comes up in the list is the frequency for that particular number of cars.

## Categorical Example

If we were interested in the number of male and females in a classroom. You can represent this also as a frequency table. A classroom with the 14 males and 10 females are represented in the frequency table below:

 Gender Frequency Male 14 Female 10 Total 24

Now instead of a number representing a variable it is a category with a frequency value attached to it.

## The benefits of a frequency table

A frequency table orders the data where appropriate in a data and displays the data in an easy to see compact form. It also shows how the data values are distributed.