Practice question · Put in order
Order the steps for constructing a histogram from raw numerical data.
- Choose a number of bins and give them equal width
- Draw a bar of that height over each bin, with the bars touching
- Find the smallest and largest values to fix the range covered
- Count how many values fell into each bin
- Assign each data value to the bin whose interval contains it
Hints
- Bins cannot be defined before you know what range they must cover.
- Heights are frequencies, so counting must precede drawing.
Show the answer
- Find the smallest and largest values to fix the range covered
- Choose a number of bins and give them equal width
- Assign each data value to the bin whose interval contains it
- Count how many values fell into each bin
- Draw a bar of that height over each bin, with the bars touching
Why
Bin width is the one free choice, and it matters: too wide hides the shape, too narrow turns the histogram into noise. Everything after that choice is mechanical counting.
Practise Data Visualisation
The app has 5 more questions on this lesson, and keeps your place in the course. Mathematics I is free to start.
More questions on Data Visualisation
- A bar chart is the wrong display for a continuous variable because its separated bars imply the categories…
- Select every design choice that makes a chart misleading.
- Sort each feature by whether it describes a histogram or a bar chart.
- The same dataset can produce a histogram with one peak or two, depending only on the bin width. What does…