Measurement Variable

A Measurement Variable is a test variable that represents a physical measure.

• AKA: Quantitative Variable.
• Context:
  • It can be converted into a nominal variable by using a classification task.
• Example(s)
  • Length.
  • Weight.
  • Density.
  • Volume.
• Counter-Example(s)
  • Nominal Variable.
  • Ranked Variable
• See: Statistical Hypothesis Testing Task, Independent Two-Sample t-Test, Grouping Variable.

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References

2016

• (Wikipedia, 2016) ⇒ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/
  • Measurement variables are, as the name implies, things you can measure. An individual observation of a measurement variable is always a number. Examples include length, weight, pH, and bone density. Other names for them include "numeric" or "quantitative" variables.

Some authors divide measurement variables into two types. One type is continuous variables, such as length of an isopod's antenna, which in theory have an infinite number of possible values. The other is discrete (or meristic) variables, which only have whole number values; these are things you count, such as the number of spines on an isopod's antenna. The mathematical theories underlying statistical tests involving measurement variables assume that the variables are continuous. Luckily, these statistical tests work well on discrete measurement variables, so you usually don't need to worry about the difference between continuous and discrete measurement variables. The only exception would be if you have a very small number of possible values of a discrete variable, in which case you might want to treat it as a nominal variable instead.

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