Numeric vs. Categorical Attributes

Fathom Overview > Attributes > Numeric vs. Categorical Attributes

Fathom makes a fundamental distinction between attributes whose values are all numeric and attributes that have one or more non-numeric values. The type of attribute determines how it can be graphed and what statistics can be computed from it. For example, categorical attributes yield counts and proportions but not means, medians, or ranges.

Most of the time, Fathom’s treatment of attributes will be what you want. But when it is not, you can override the default, as shown below.

Year is being treated as numeric.	To force Year to be treated as categorical, hold down the Shift key when dropping the attribute on the graph axis.
Passengers is being treated as categorical because of the presence of the “>7” values.	To force Passengers to be treated as numeric, hold down Ctrl (Win) Option (Mac) when dropping the attribute on the graph axis. Note that to get the formula to compute the mean properly, the mean has to be filtered with isNumber().