Definitions:
- Individuals: Objects described by a set of data. Individuals may be people, animals, or things.
- Variable: Any characteristic of an individual. A variable can take different values for different individuals.
- Categorical Variable: Places an individual into one of several groups or categories.
- Quantitative Variable: Takes numerical values for which it makes sense to find an average.
- Distribution: Tells us what values the variable takes and how often it takes these values.
What You Need to Know:
- What is statistics? Statistics is the science of data, all data tells a story and data analysis helps to decode it. Every set of data contains individuals and they contain variables. Some variables that are numerical are quantitative and others are not. For example, one does not average a zip code but someone could average a GPA. Depending on the type of data determines on how the data can be viewed (type of graph). In some types of data tables a row is an individual (aka cases) and a column is a variable. A variable usually consists of a value that varies.