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7.2. Visualizing Numerical Distributions — Computational and Inferential Thinking

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Many of the variables that data scientists study are quantitative or numerical. Their values are numbers on which you can perform arithmetic. Examples that we have seen include the number of periods in chapters of a book, the amount of money made by movies, and the age of people in the United States. The values of a categorical variable can be given numerical codes, but that doesn’t make the variable quantitative. In the example in which we studied Census data broken down by age group, the categorial variable SEX had the numerical codes 1 for ‘Male,’ 2 for ‘Female,’ and 0 for the aggregate of both groups 1 and 2. While 0, 1, and 2 are numbers, in this context it doesn’t make sense to subtract 1 from 2, or take the average of 0, 1, and 2, or perform other arithmetic on the three values. SEX is a categorical variable even though the values have been given a numerical code. For our main example, we will return to a dataset that we studied when we were visualizing categorical data. It is t

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