SQL Server 2017 Developer's Guide

Continuous and discrete variables

Finally, it is time to check for linear dependencies between a continuous and a discrete variable. You can do this by measuring the variance between means of the continuous variable in different groups of discrete variable, for example measuring the difference in salary (continuous variable) between different genders (discrete variable). The null hypothesis here is that all variance between means is a result of the variance within each group, for example there is one woman with a very large salary, which raises the mean salary in the female group and makes a difference to the male group. If you reject it, this means that there is some significant variance in the means between groups. This is also known as ...