Question

how does descrete variable from continuous variables?

Answer 1

Hello student, here I am considering you are asking for the difference between discrete and continuous variables. Here, I have explained what they are and steps to determine whether a variable is discrete or continuous, please comment in the case of any doubt, I would love to clarify it.

Answer

Discrete variables are countable in a finite amount of time. For example, you can count the change in your pocket. You can count the money in your bank account. You could also count the amount of money in everyone’s bank accounts. It might take you a long time to count that last item, but the point is—it’s still countable.

Discrete variables on a scatter plot here -

Continuous Variables would (literally) take forever to count. In fact, you would get to “forever” and never finish counting them. For example, take an age. You can’t count “age”. Why not? Because it would literally take forever. For example, you could be:
25 years, 10 months, 2 days, 5 hours, 4 seconds, 4 milliseconds, 8 nanoseconds, 99 picoseconds…and so on.

Time is a continuous variable.

Here are the steps to determine if a variable is discrete or continuous -

Step 1: Figure out how long it would take you to sit down and count out the possible values of your variable. For example, if your variable is “Temperature in Arizona,” how long would it take you to write every possible temperature? It would take you literally forever:

50°, 50.1°, 50.11°, 50.111°, 50.1111°, …

If you start counting now and never, ever, ever finish (i.e. the numbers go on and on until infinity), you have what’s called a continuous variable.

If your variable is “Number of Planets around a star,” then you can count all of the numbers out (there can’t be an infinite number of planets). That is a discrete variable.

Step 2: Think about “hidden” numbers that you haven’t considered. For example: is time a discrete or continuous variable? You might think it’s continuous (after all, time goes on forever, right?) but if we’re thinking about numbers on a wristwatch (or a stopwatch), those numbers are limited by the numbers or number of decimal places that a manufacturer has decided to put into the watch. It’s unlikely that you’ll be given an ambiguous question like this in your elementary stats class but it’s worth thinking about!