Creating a Histogram

Creating a Histogram

A histogram is a graphical representation of a set of data. It is useful to visually inspect data for its range, distribution, location, scale, skewness, etc. There are many uses for histogram, there you should know how to create one.

Let’s explore a set of data and create default histograms using a variety of methods. If you have a way to create a histogram using some other method or software package please send it over and we’ll add it to the article.

The Data

This is just completely made up data set.

5, 7, 3, 4, 3, 6, 9, 2, 4, 3, 6, 9, 1, 3, 4, 7, 4, 5, 4, 3

The values range from a low of 1 and a high of 9. All integers.

A Manually Created Histogram

Draw and label the x and y axis of the chart. For the x-axis a span from zero to ten will encompass all the values in the dataset. For the y-axis, we can include integers starting at zero and we could go up to 20, given that is the number of values in the dataset, yet not all values are the same, so let’s start with zero to ten.

The x-axis is our values (test scores, plant heights rounded to centimeters, whatever the dataset represents). The y-axis is the count of values within the specific bin.