The variables resulting from the recoding categorical variables with more than two categories into the sequence of binary variables. Marital status, for instance, if originally labeled 1 for the married, 2 for single and 3 for divorced, widowed or separated, can be rede?ned in the terms of two variables which are given as follows

Variable 1: 1 if single, 0 otherwise;

Variable 2: 1 if the divorced, widowed or separated, 0 otherwise;

For the married person both the new variables would be zero. In common the categorical variable with k categories would be recorded in the terms of k 1 dummy variables. Such recoding is made in use before polychotomous variables are used as the explanatory variables in a regression analysis to avoid the unreasonable supposition with the original numerical codes for the categories, that is the values 1; 2; ... ; k, correspond to the interval scale. This procedure is generally known as dummy coding