Practical Data Analysis with JMP®

Continuous Data and Probability

In Chapter 5 we developed a model of discrete random variables around the concept of a probability value attaching to individual possible values of a random variable. In this chapter we'll consider continuous random variables. Continuous data has the property that there are an infinite number of possible values between any two possible values. For example, the winning time in the next Olympic marathon is a continuous variable: no matter how thinly we slice the imaginable values, it is always possible that the winner's time will fall between two values that we imagined. As a practical matter, we tend to measure continuous variables discretely—the official scores might report race times to the nearest 100^th second—but ...