8 Ways to deal with Continuous Variables in Predictive Modeling

Let's come straight to the point on this one – there are only 2 types of variables you see – Continuous and Discrete. Further, discrete variables can divided into Nominal (categorical) and Ordinal. We did a post on how to handle categorical variables last week, so you would expect a similar post on continuous variable. Yes, you are right – In this article, we will explain all possible ways for a beginner to handle continuous variables while doing machine learning or statistical modeling. But, before we actually start, first things first. Simply put, if a variable can take any value between its minimum and maximum value, then it is called a continuous variable. By nature, a lot of things we deal with fall in this category: age, weight, height being some of them.