👉 The term "covariate" in statistics refers to a variable that influences or is influenced by another variable. This can be a continuous, binary, categorical, ordinal, interval, ratio, proportion, or other type of variable. The influence of one variable on another depends on how the variables are related and interact with each other. In many cases, covariates are used to predict the value of an outcome variable based on the values of other variables, which is known as regression analysis.