Classifying numerical and categorical variables

Descriptive statistics are all about variables. You must know what you are describing to define corresponding descriptive statistics.

A variable is also referred to as a feature or attribute in other literature. They all mean the same thing: a single column in a tabulated dataset.

In this section, you will examine the two most important variable types, numerical and categorical, and learn to distinguish between them. Categorical variables are discrete and usually represent a classification property of entry. Numerical variables are continuous and descriptive quantitatively. Descriptive statistics that can be applied to one kind of variable may not be applied to another one, hence distinguishing between them precedes analytics.

Distinguishing between numerical and categorical variables

In order to understand the differences between the two types of variables with the help of an example, I will be using the population estimates...