[EMAIL PROTECTED] (Casey) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> Hi, i needed some help in determining if some data i have are discrete
> or continuous, i know this sound silly, but if someone can provide the
> answer with some relevant proof, it will be much appreciated!!! I have
> a string of data that thier values ranges from 0 to 100000 or more,
> and values do not occur more than once, it looked discrete in the
> first place but when i use a statistic software to fit a distribution,
> the result is continuous, same happened when i do it manually using
> conventional distribution fitting and testing method methods
> (histogram, summary statistics, chi-square test and Kolmogorov-Smirov
> test). So are these data discrete? or continuous? Is there other ways
> or methods i can test the data? Will anyone please help, thank you for
> your time!!
All data that is represented as digits is only recorded to a finite
number of places, so all such data is in fact discrete.
What is perhaps more of an issue is how you want to think of, or
represent such data. What do the values measure?
As a first step, it's usual to think of counts of things as discrete,
and measurements that are in some sense intrinsically continuous
(lengths, times, temperatures) as continuous, even when they are
measured to only a few significant figures. And some things are
categorical, which are discrete, but don't have a ratio scale in the
same way that a count does ("two" objects are twice as many as "one"
object).
Glen
.
.
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