This can be alternatively phrased as : " a person who does not use the principle of indifference to assign prior probabilities to discrete variables, is either not ignorant about them, or reasoning inconsistently ".
32.
From the definition of mutual information for discrete variables, the mutual information I ( F _ a; C ) between the aggregate feature variable F _ a and the category variable C is given by:
33.
For instance, the above expression allows for determining statistical characteristics of such a discrete variable ( such as its mean, its variance and its kurtosis ), starting from the formulas given for a continuous distribution of the probability.
34.
In contrast, a "'discrete variable "'over a particular range of real values is one for which, for any value in the range that the variable is permitted to take on, there is a positive minimum distance to the nearest other permissible value.
35.
"' Discrete time "'views values of variables as occurring at distinct, separate " points in time ", or equivalently as being unchanged throughout each non-zero region of time ( " time period " ) & mdash; that is, time is viewed as a discrete variable.
36.
Von Neumann joined the team, contributed ideas for ENIAC's successor, EDVAC ( Electronic Discrete Variable Calculator ), and wrote a widely distributed paper on those ideas, " First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, " which included certain of Eckert's and Mauchly's concepts without crediting them.
37.
? " c " is the intercorrelation of two discrete variables and may be used with variables having two or more levels . ? " c " is a symmetrical measure, it does not matter which variable we place in the columns and which in the rows.
38.
In the following formalism, the number of nuclides or the nuclide population " N ", is of course a discrete variable ( a natural number ) but for any physical sample " N " is so large that it can be treated as a continuous variable.
39.
For example, a four-way discrete variable of blood type with the possible values " A, B, AB, O " would be converted to separate two-way dummy variables, " is-A, is-B, is-AB, is-O ", where only one of them has the value 1 and all the rest have the value 0.
40.
In problems with discrete variables ( e . g . dice, cards, categorical data ) the principle reduces to the principle of indifference, as the " symmetry " in the discrete case is a permutation of the labels, that is the permutation group is the relevant transformation group for this problem.
