Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In continuous-time dynamics, the variable time is treated as continuous, and the equation describing the evolution of some variable over time is a differential equation. [7] The instantaneous rate of change is a well-defined concept that takes the ratio of the change in the dependent variable to the independent variable at a specific instant.
Because variables conforming only to nominal or ordinal measurements cannot be reasonably measured numerically, sometimes they are grouped together as categorical variables, whereas ratio and interval measurements are grouped together as quantitative variables, which can be either discrete or continuous, due to their numerical nature.
A categorical variable that can take on exactly two values is termed a binary variable or a dichotomous variable; an important special case is the Bernoulli variable. Categorical variables with more than two possible values are called polytomous variables; categorical variables are often assumed to be polytomous unless otherwise specified.
If the first independent variable is a categorical variable (e.g. gender) and the second is a continuous variable (e.g. scores on the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS)), then b 1 represents the difference in the dependent variable between males and females when life satisfaction is zero. However, a zero score on the Satisfaction With Life ...
For example, the categorical variable(s) might describe treatment and the continuous variable(s) might be covariates (CV)'s, typically nuisance variables; or vice versa. Mathematically, ANCOVA decomposes the variance in the DV into variance explained by the CV(s), variance explained by the categorical IV, and residual variance.
Graphs that are appropriate for bivariate analysis depend on the type of variable. For two continuous variables, a scatterplot is a common graph. When one variable is categorical and the other continuous, a box plot is common and when both are categorical a mosaic plot is common. These graphs are part of descriptive statistics.
For ordinal variables the median can be calculated as a measure of central tendency and the range (and variations of it) as a measure of dispersion. For interval level variables, the arithmetic mean (average) and standard deviation are added to the toolbox and, for ratio level variables, we add the geometric mean and harmonic mean as measures ...
A categorical distribution is a discrete probability distribution whose sample space is the set of k individually identified items. It is the generalization of the Bernoulli distribution for a categorical random variable. In one formulation of the distribution, the sample space is taken to be a finite sequence of integers.