From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data

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Histograms

Histograms

From the course: Data Literacy: Exploring and Describing Data

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Histograms

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- [Instructor] We've looked at box plots, which are wonderful for judging the symmetry of a distribution and the presence of outliers. But histograms do a different thing. They let you know about differences in shape, the shape of your data. Specifically, they answer a vague question, what does your data look like? Is it symmetrical, something we can do with box plots, but you get a different impression of it with histograms. Is there more than one peak, something that is much clearer with a histogram? And are there gaps or other unusual values? And so this is a compliment to box plots. And whenever I'm working with quantitative data, I always do both. I do a box plot to check for outliers and I a histogram to check for the shape. Now let's see what kind of insights we can get by looking at some specific examples of histograms. This is a histogram of a uniform distribution. Now it tapers off a little bit at the sides, but you can see that it's kind of sort of flat across the top. What…

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