What is a categorical variable in statistics?

Answer 1

WHAT THE HELL IS A CATEGORICAL VARIABLE! Actually hell may be an observation in a categorical variable what we might call "place of final rest". The term, categorical variable, can best be difined by examining it parts. The categorical part: a grouping of things with like characteristics, i.e., the going to hell group and the going to heaven group. Or how you group the women in a bar; the women with blonde hair, the women with red hair and the firey redheads. But notice there are different colors of hair; that is, hair color varies -- did I say varies? Yes I did. So when something varies or changes what do we have? A variable!! We can thing of hair color as a categorical variable. But notice also that we can think of sex as a categorical variable. But there can be only categories in the variable sex, male or female; unless your talking about the act of sex in which case, that is for me, there is only one category, infrequent. You might say that gender or sex can vary in only two ways, either you're male or you're female; there are no other choices. This means that the categorical variable has two degrees of freedom. How many degrees of freedom are in the categorical variable, sexual preference? So what do we have after all of this horseshit: things change; that is they vary. The number of blondes in a bar changes from night to night. Go to the bar and take a tablet with you. OK, you can scribble on a napkin if you want to...just don't get it soaked in beer. Write this prase at the top of the napkin: Number of blondes in the bar tonight." Beside that write the day, Monday, Tuesday, ect. Now sit and sip you draft and count the number of blondes on a Monday night and write that number down. 36 blondes on Monday night. Do the same for the other nights in the week. Here's the way your table might look: Day of Week Number of Blondes Mon 22 Tue 54 Wed 120 Thu 12 Fri 18 Sat 77 Sun 0 What can we say about the table. Well, we can say that we have counted the numberof blondes in the bar by day of the week. This is called tabulation or tallying. What are the categorical variales in the table? Notice anything unusual about Wednesday night?