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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.
A variable of this type is called a dummy variable. If the dependent variable is a dummy variable, then logistic regression or probit regression is commonly employed. In the case of regression analysis, a dummy variable can be used to represent subgroups of the sample in a study (e.g. the value 0 corresponding to a constituent of the control ...
A numerical univariate data is discrete if the set of all possible values is finite or countably infinite. Discrete univariate data are usually associated with counting (such as the number of books read by a person). A numerical univariate data is continuous if the set of all possible values is an interval of numbers.
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.
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 ]
Enumerated types can also prevent a programmer from writing illogical code such as performing mathematical operations on the values of the enumerators. If the value of a variable that was assigned an enumerator were to be printed, some programming languages could also print the name of the enumerator rather than its underlying numerical value.
In statistics, where classification is often done with logistic regression or a similar procedure, the properties of observations are termed explanatory variables (or independent variables, regressors, etc.), and the categories to be predicted are known as outcomes, which are considered to be possible values of the dependent variable.