Question

Explain why on a overview of all patients, patients heights would be categorical but when looking at each individual patient their heights are continuous. Example: There are twelve patients that are over 6ft tall with patient 123 with the tallest height of 6 ft 2 inches.

Answer 1

This is because we have converted the continuous data into discrete data while dealing with an overview of all patients. We can safely say that that height as an attribute is continuous, but to deal with a large amount of data( like height of all patients), we can convert these data into categorical data by converting them into classes ( Eg- 5 - 5.5 ft, 5.5 - 6 ft, 6 - 6.5 ft , etc). But while looking at height of each patients we will still have a continuous data with values between any of the constructed classes.