Tuesday, March 1, 2011

Perspectives on Dummy Variables

Stan Coleman, Trainer, Variable Special Forces:
"The life of a dummy variable is quite hard. These variables need to maintain strict focus their entire lives--they can only take values of zero or one. Can you imagine a continuous random variable doing that? They can't! It's impossible--probability zero."


Susan Gustafson, Primary School Teacher:
"I just don't understand the hype about the dummy variables. I've had many dummy variables come through my classroom. While I didn't know at the time they would grow up to become dummy variables, I distinctly remember many of these students. They were not at all interested in broadening their horizons. Forget trying to teach anything other than the Natural numbers to those students."

1 comment:

  1. A dummy variable is used in regression analysis to control for the effects of a discrete or categorical variable. A simple example is using a dummy variable to control for gender. If an observation is from a male, the value of the dummy variable is set to zero. If an observation is from a female, the value of the dummy variable is set to one.

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