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Sep. 12th, 2012 08:05 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
stormdogAlright, beginning chapter two, Basic Descriptive Statistics. I'm going to blather about statistics terminology a bit.
You know, I really wanted to have a discussion with my instructor about gender as a variable in the last class session. I agree that gender is nominal rather than ordinal of course, but I'm not convinced that's it's discrete instead of continuous. And that's not even getting into the matter of the number of categories that are required. Since, as we discussed, a nominal variable must have an exhaustive list of categories, we at *least* need an 'other' on top of 'male' and 'female'. But this is a math class, so I let it go. *grins*
I was also, the professor said, the first student she's ever had who pointed out a problem with her rule of thumb that ordinal variables must be discrete rather than continuous. I offered an example of an ordinal variable that's continuous and she agreed. I commented that when someone tells me how a system works, I start instinctively looking for edge cases that break it. Sometimes I think I should have been a hacker.
You know, I really wanted to have a discussion with my instructor about gender as a variable in the last class session. I agree that gender is nominal rather than ordinal of course, but I'm not convinced that's it's discrete instead of continuous. And that's not even getting into the matter of the number of categories that are required. Since, as we discussed, a nominal variable must have an exhaustive list of categories, we at *least* need an 'other' on top of 'male' and 'female'. But this is a math class, so I let it go. *grins*
I was also, the professor said, the first student she's ever had who pointed out a problem with her rule of thumb that ordinal variables must be discrete rather than continuous. I offered an example of an ordinal variable that's continuous and she agreed. I commented that when someone tells me how a system works, I start instinctively looking for edge cases that break it. Sometimes I think I should have been a hacker.
