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6 - Discrete and Continuous Variables

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  aN Invalid Date NaN

Carlos Fernandez-Granda
Affiliation:
New York University
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Summary

This chapter discusses how to build probabilistic models that include both discrete and continuous variables. Mathematically, this is achieved by defining them as random variables within the same probability space. In practice, the variables are manipulated using their marginal and conditional distributions. We define the conditional pmf of a discrete random variable given a continuous variable, and the conditional probability density of a continuous random variable given a discrete variable. We use these objects to build mixture models and apply them to model height in a population. Next, we describe Gaussian discriminant analysis, a classification method based on mixture models with Gaussian conditional distributions, and apply it to diagnose Alzheimer's disease. Then, we explain how to perform clustering using Gaussian mixture models and leverage the approach to cluster NBA players. Finally, we introduce the framework of Bayesian statistics which enables us to explicitly encode our uncertainty about model parameters, and use it to analyze poll data from the 2020 United States presidential election.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2025

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