Dummy variable (statistics)

This article is about the usage in statistics. For the usage in computing and math, see Bound variable.

In regression analysis, a dummy variable (also known as indicator variable or just dummy) is one that takes a binary value (0 or 1) to indicate the absence or presence of some categorical effect that may be expected to shift the outcome. In machine learning this is known as one-hot encoding.

Dummy variables are commonly used in regression analysis to represent categorical variables that have more than two levels, such as education level or occupation. In this case, multiple dummy variables would be created to represent each level of the variable, and only one dummy variable would take on a value of 1 for each observation. Dummy variables are useful because they allow the use of categorical variables in our analysis, which would otherwise be difficult to include due to their non-numeric nature. .

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