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University of Minnesota
School of Statistics
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Bin Width Choice For Histograms

The histogram below is for measurements of the duration (in minutes) for eruptions of the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. Try to change the bin width by dragging the arrow underneath the bin width scale. For large bin widths, the bimodal nature of the dataset is hidden, and for small bin widths the plot reduces to a spike at each data point. What bin width do you think provides the best picture of the underlying data?

This example was created by R. Webster West, Dept. of Statistics, Univ. of South Carolina.



Luke Tierney
2000-05-15