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In statistics, is there a word for the share of data items that has a value for a certain property? Or in spreadsheet terms, the share of rows that have a value in a certain column?

In Dutch, there is the word "vulgraad" (lit. "filling rate") that means just that but we find it hard to come up with a proper English translation. "Percent non-empty" is the best we came up with yet, but we feel that there has to be a noun like in Dutch.

As an example, given a table of people:

First name        Middle name      Last name
--------------------------------------------
Theodore                           Roosevelt
Eddy              Van              Halen
Peter                              Stuyvesant
Rutger                             Hauer

one could say that the middle name field has a vulgraad of 25%.

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    I strongly suspect such a word does not exist.
    – Urbycoz
    Aug 9, 2012 at 9:17
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    I agree that a word for this almost certainly doesn't exist. However, I think that if you are in an environment where you could develop a consensus among the people you are dealing with, you could probably get the term "fill rate" to stick (not "filling rate", which doesn't feel native enough). New terms in a language have to start somewhere, and why not with you? ;)
    – Questioner
    Aug 13, 2012 at 3:07

2 Answers 2

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I would say that the "Middle name" column is 25% populated.

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It's fill factor. If later you want to know the counts (or just general idea) of all the repeated data values in a column, it is called value spread.

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  • These terms by the way are the official terms in database talk.
    – Chris
    Aug 17, 2012 at 1:26

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