Histogram nuances

Visualization Best Practices in R

Nick Strayer

Instructor

Histogram positives

• Intuitive
• Interpretable

Histogram negatives

• Sensitive to bin placements
• Iffy with small amounts of data

Adjusting number of bins

• Exact same data
• Varying bin-numbers (geom_histogram(bins = n))) from 10 to 55

Bin number best practices

• If length(data$x) > 150 → bins = 100
• Otherwise, play around to get a good sense of the data

Reality

• Beware of digit preferences
• Data from automated sources are less likely to be problematic

Let's improve some histograms!

Visualization Best Practices in R