A continuous variable can take any value from an interval, or from all real numbers; there is no limit for the number of distinct values here. Of course, you could try to discretize a continuous variable and then treat it as a discrete one. I will discuss different discretization options in the next chapter. In this section, I am going to introduce some statistical measures that describe the distribution of a continuous variable, measures that are called descriptive statistics.

You want to understand the distribution of a continuous variable. You can create graphs for all continuous variables. However, comparing tens or even hundreds of graphs visually does not tell you much. You can also describe the distribution numerically, with descriptive statistics. Comparing numbers is much faster and easier than comparing graphs. The you use are the moments of a .

The well-known are the center, spread, skewness, and tailedness of distribution...