What are the terms used in Statistics

• Variables are the characteristics, or measurements, which describe objects, for example, the gender or the height of the people.
• Data collected as variables can be of different types:
  • Categorical variables are just labels for the different categories, for example gender, blood types, eye colour, country of birth;
  • Quantitative variables are variables which can be found by counting or measuring a quantity.
  • Quantitative variables can be either:
    • discrete (able to take only specific number values), for example number of people or number of trees in a paddock;
    • continuous (taking any value), for example height, temperature, money.
• A collection of variables which describe the variation within a group (or collection) is termed a data set.
• A statistical population is all possible values of the group (for example a census).
• Generally we collect a random sample to make conclusions about the population.