In
mathematics,
discretization concerns the process of transferring
continuous functions, models, and equations into counterparts. This process is usually carried out as a first step toward making them suitable for numerical evaluation and implementation on digital computers. Processing on a digital computer requires another process called
quantization.
Dichotomization is the special case of discretization in which the number of discrete classes is 2, which can approximate a continuous variable as a
binary variable (creating a
dichotomy for
modeling purposes).