data point
a specific piece of information derived from a larger set of data. A data point is often formed by the intersection of two other pieces of information, as in the intersection of a person’s score on one variable with his or her score on a second variable in a scatterplot. For example, 10 people could be asked their average number of hours of sleep per night and the number of colds they tend to have in a year. Then, the number of sleep hours could be recorded along the horizontal x-axis and the number of colds per year recorded along the vertical y-axis, resulting in 10 separate data points.