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Statistics vocabulary · Data and Variables

Continuous variable

Meaning in statistics, with examples

nounCore term

In statistics, continuous variable means: A variable that can take any value within a range, including fractions, such as height, temperature, time or income.

In Turkish: sürekli değişken

How it is used

Summarised with means, standard deviations or medians and analysed with t-tests, correlation and regression. Analysts are often advised not to cut continuous variables into groups, because information is lost. Contrasted with discrete variables, which take separate values such as counts.

Example sentences

  1. Age was treated as a continuous variable rather than in ten-year bands.

  2. Blood pressure is a continuous variable, so a t-test is more suitable than chi-square here.

Common collocations

  • continuous outcome
  • treat as continuous
  • continuous data
  • discrete variable
  • categorical variableA variable whose values are groups or labels rather than measured quantities, such as blood type, city of residence or 'yes/no' answers.
  • variableAny characteristic that can take different values from one person, object or case to another, such as age, income, gender or test score.
  • t-testA hypothesis test that compares means: one group's mean with a fixed value, the means of two independent groups, or two measurements of the same people.
  • linear regressionA regression method that models the outcome as a straight-line function of one or more predictors, estimating an intercept and one slope per predictor.
  • histogramA chart of touching bars showing how many observations of a numeric variable fall into each interval, called a bin.

More terms: Data and Variables

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