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In statistics, a categorical variable (also called qualitative variable) is a variable that can take on one of a limited, and usually fixed, number of possible values, assigning each individual or other unit of observation to a particular group or nominal category on the basis of some qualitative property. [1]
This is a list of statistical procedures which can be used for the analysis of categorical data, also known as data on the nominal scale and as categorical variables. General tests [ edit ]
In probability theory and statistics, a categorical distribution (also called a generalized Bernoulli distribution, multinoulli distribution [1]) is a discrete probability distribution that describes the possible results of a random variable that can take on one of K possible categories, with the probability of each category separately specified.
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 variable used to associate each data point in a set of observations, or in a particular instance, to a certain qualitative category is a categorical variable. Categorical variables have two types of scales, ordinal and nominal. [1] The first type of categorical scale is dependent on natural ordering, levels that are defined by a sense of quality.
The variable could take on a value of 1 for males and 0 for females (or vice versa). In machine learning this is known as one-hot encoding. Dummy variables are commonly used in regression analysis to represent categorical variables that have more than two levels, such as education level or occupation.
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.
Ordinal data is a categorical, statistical data type where the variables have natural, ordered categories and the distances between the categories are not known. [1]: 2 These data exist on an ordinal scale, one of four levels of measurement described by S. S. Stevens in 1946.