Binning: Dividing Your Histogram

Abstract

Visualizing large amounts of data is more important than ever. With terabytes of data at everyone's fingertips, effective strategies for organizing and synthesizing data need to be reexamined. This poster will examine different strategies for appropriately choosing how many bins a histogram might require. We will explore different techniques with distribution fitting in mind and examine some visualization tricks that can be used to manipulate the data displays. Special emphasis will be given to Excel and the python package mathplotlib for how to make a histogram that tells the story of your data.