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Summary Statistics - Variable Types Cheatsheet - Codecademy

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34 views2 pages

Summary Statistics - Variable Types Cheatsheet - Codecademy

Uploaded by

Jose Lorenzo
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Cheatsheets / Summary Statistics

Variable Types
Quantitative Vs. Categorical Variables
Variables can be either quantitative or categorical. Quantitative variables
are amounts or counts; for example, age, number of children, and income
are all quantitative variables. Categorical variables represent groupings; for
example, type of pet, agreement rating, and brand of shoes are all
categorical variables.

Quantitative Variables
Quantitative variables are numeric in nature and can be either continuous
or discrete. Continuous variables contain measurements with decimal
precision, for example the height or weight of a person. Discrete variables
contain counts that must be whole integer values, such as the number of
members in a person’s family, or the number of goals a basketball team
scored in a game.

Categorical Variables
Categorical variables consist of data that can be grouped into distinct
categories, and are ordinal or nominal. Ordinal categorical variables which
are groups that contain an inherent ranking, such as ratings of plays or
responses to a survey question with a point scale e.g., on a scale from 1-7,
how happy are you right now? Nominal categorical variables are made of
categories without an inherent order, examples of nominal variables are
species of ants, or people’s hair color.

Ordinal Vs. Discrete Variables


A key distinction between ordinal categorical variables and discrete
quantitative variables is that there is a uniform degree of di erence within
discrete quantitative variables. The di erence between one and two kittens
is the same as the di erence between ve and six kittens. With ordinal
categorical variables however, the di erence between categories can vary
greatly. The di erence between a one star rating and a two star rating for
example can be di erent than a three star rating and a four star rating.
Binary Categorical Variables
Categorical variables can also be binary or dichotomous variables. Binary
variables are nominal categorical variables that contain only two, mutually
exclusive categories. Examples of binary variables are if a person is
pregnant, or if a house’s price is above or below a particular price.

Inspecting Variable Types


One of the most important rst steps when working with a dataset is to
inspect the variable types, and identify relevant variables. An e cient print(df.head())
method to use when inspecting variables is the .head() method which will
return the rst rows of a dataset.

Matching Variable Types and Data Types


Ensuring that variables within your dataset are expressed with the
appropriate data type will help you manage your data e ectively, and allow print(df.dtypes)
you to perform any necessary operations on your variables. When using
Python, the data types of pandas dataframes can be inspected with the
.dtypes accessor. Usually, continuous quantitative variables are
represented as oats, discrete quantitative variables as integers, binary
variables as booleans, nominal categorical variables as strings, and ordinal
categorical variables as integers or strings.

Storing Ordinal Categories


It is often useful to store ordinal categorical variables as both strings and
integers. For example, suppose there is a variable named response that
contains responses to the question “Rate your agreement with the
statement: the wealthy should pay higher taxes,” where the response
options are “strongly disagree”, “disagree”, “neutral”, “agree” and “strongly
agree”. Then in order to do future calculations, we may want to also store
those categories as numerical values such as 0, 1, 2, 3, and 4.

The Pandas Category Data Type


When working with categorical variables in Python, especially ordinal
categorical variables, it can often be advantageous to use the Pandas df['column_cat'] = pd.Categorical(df['column'], ['cat1',
speci c category datatype, which allows you to store category names with 'cat2', 'cat3'], ordered = True)
associated values and rankings.

Altering a Variable’s Data Type


Often when working with datasets, variables will be assigned an
inappropriate datatype. For example you may have a continuous variable
which is assigned the str datatype. In this scenario, it will not be possible
to perform numerical operations on that variable. In this case it will be
necessary to alter the datatype to something more appropriate, such as
float .

Methods for Altering Data Types


In the event that you need to alter the datatype of a variable in Python, you
can use the .astype() method, which allows you to assign a new datatype df['column'] = df['column'].astype('int')
to a variable in your dataset. However there may be cases where certain df['column'] = df['column'].replace(['missing'], None)
values do not allow you to implement .astype() for example a missing
value in a discrete variable that was assigned the str datatype. To change
this variable’s datatype to int you would need to can use the .replace()
method to change missing values to something more appropriate, then
alter the data type of the variable.

One-Hot Encoding with Python


When working with nominal categorical variables in Python, it can be useful
to use One-Hot Encoding, which is a technique that will e ectively create df = pd.get_dummies(data = df, columns= ['column1',
binary variables for each of the nominal categories. This encodes the 'column2')
variable without creating an order among the categories. To one-hot
encode a variable in a pandas dataframe, we can use the .get_dummies() .

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