|First described by||Karl Pearson|
|Purpose||To roughly assess the probability distribution of a given variable by depicting the frequencies of observations occurring in certain ranges of values|
In statistics, a histogram is a graphical representation of the distribution of data. It is an estimate of the probability distribution of a continuous variable and was first introduced by Karl Pearson. A histogram is a representation of tabulated frequencies, shown as adjacent rectangles, erected over discrete intervals (bins), with an area equal to the frequency of the observations in the interval. The height of a rectangle is also equal to the frequency density of the interval, i.e., the frequency divided by the width of the interval. The total area of the histogram is equal to the number of data. A histogram may also be normalized displaying relative frequencies. It then shows the proportion of cases that fall into each of several categories, with the total area equaling 1. The categories are usually specified as consecutive, non-overlapping intervals of a variable. The categories (intervals) must be adjacent, and often are chosen to be of the same size. The rectangles of a histogram are drawn so that they touch each other to indicate that the original variable is continuous.
Histograms are used to plot the density of data, and often for density estimation: estimating the probability density function of the underlying variable. The total area of a histogram used for probability density is always normalized to 1. If the length of the intervals on the x-axis are all 1, then a histogram is identical to a relative frequency plot.
An alternative to the histogram is kernel density estimation, which uses a kernel to smooth samples. This will construct a smooth probability density function, which will in general more accurately reflect the underlying variable.
The etymology of the word histogram is uncertain. Sometimes it is said to be derived from the Greek histos 'anything set upright' (as the masts of a ship, the bar of a loom, or the vertical bars of a histogram); and gramma 'drawing, record, writing'. It is also said that Karl Pearson, who introduced the term in 1891, derived the name from "historical diagram".
The U.S. Census Bureau found that there were 124 million people who work outside of their homes. Using their data on the time occupied by travel to work, Table 2 below shows the absolute number of people who responded with travel times "at least 15 but less than 20 minutes" is higher than the numbers for the categories above and below it. This is likely due to people rounding their reported journey time. The problem of reporting values as somewhat arbitrarily rounded numbers is a common phenomenon when collecting data from people.
Data by absolute numbers Interval Width Quantity Quantity/width 0 5 4180 836 5 5 13687 2737 10 5 18618 3723 15 5 19634 3926 20 5 17981 3596 25 5 7190 1438 30 5 16369 3273 35 5 3212 642 40 5 4122 824 45 15 9200 613 60 30 6461 215 90 60 3435 57
This histogram shows the number of cases per unit interval so that the height of each bar is equal to the proportion of total people in the survey who fall into that category. The area under the curve represents the total number of cases (124 million). This type of histogram shows absolute numbers, with Q in thousands.
Data by proportion Interval Width Quantity (Q) Q/total/width 0 5 4180 0.0067 5 5 13687 0.0221 10 5 18618 0.0300 15 5 19634 0.0316 20 5 17981 0.0290 25 5 7190 0.0116 30 5 16369 0.0264 35 5 3212 0.0052 40 5 4122 0.0066 45 15 9200 0.0049 60 30 6461 0.0017 90 60 3435 0.0005
This histogram differs from the first only in the vertical scale. The height of each bar is the decimal percentage of the total that each category represents, and the total area of all the bars is equal to 1, the decimal equivalent of 100%. The curve displayed is a simple density estimate. This version shows proportions, and is also known as a unit area histogram.
In other words, a histogram represents a frequency distribution by means of rectangles whose widths represent class intervals and whose areas are proportional to the corresponding frequencies. The intervals are placed together in order to show that the data represented by the histogram, while exclusive, is also continuous. (E.g., in a histogram it is possible to have two connecting intervals of 10.5–20.5 and 20.5–33.5, but not two connecting intervals of 10.5–20.5 and 22.5–32.5. Empty intervals are represented as empty and not skipped.)
Mathematical definition 
In a more general mathematical sense, a histogram is a function mi that counts the number of observations that fall into each of the disjoint categories (known as bins), whereas the graph of a histogram is merely one way to represent a histogram. Thus, if we let n be the total number of observations and k be the total number of bins, the histogram mi meets the following conditions:
Cumulative histogram 
A cumulative histogram is a mapping that counts the cumulative number of observations in all of the bins up to the specified bin. That is, the cumulative histogram Mi of a histogram mj is defined as:
Number of bins and width 
There is no "best" number of bins, and different bin sizes can reveal different features of the data. Grouping data is as least as old as Graunt's work in the 17th century, but no systematic guidelines were given until Sturges's work in 1926
Some theoreticians have attempted to determine an optimal number of bins, but these methods generally make strong assumptions about the shape of the distribution. Depending on the actual data distribution and the goals of the analysis, different bin widths may be appropriate, so experimentation is usually needed to determine an appropriate width. There are, however, various useful guidelines and rules of thumb.
The number of bins k can be assigned directly or can be calculated from a suggested bin width h as:
The braces indicate the ceiling function.
- Square-root choice
which takes the square root of the number of data points in the sample (used by Excel histograms and many others).
- Sturges' formula
Sturges' formula is derived from a binomial distribution and implicitly assumes an approximately normal distribution.
It implicitly bases the bin sizes on the range of the data and can perform poorly if n < 30. It may also perform poorly if the data are not normally distributed.
- Rice Rule
The Rice Rule  is presented as a simple alternative to Sturges's rule.
- Doane's formula
Doane's formula is a modification of Sturges' formula which attempts to improve its performance with non-normal data.
where is the estimated 3rd-moment-skewness of the distribution and
- Scott's normal reference rule
where is the sample standard deviation. Scott's normal reference rule is optimal for random samples of normally distributed data, in the sense that it minimizes the integrated mean squared error of the density estimate.
- Freedman–Diaconis' choice
which is based on the interquartile range, denoted by IQR. It replaces 3.5σ of Scott's rule with 2 IQR, which is less sensitive than the standard deviation to outliers in data.
where and are mean and biased variance of a histogram with bin-width , and .
A good reason why the number of bins should be proportional to is the following: suppose that the data are obtained as independent realizations of a bounded probability distribution with smooth density. Then the histogram remains equally »rugged« as tends to infinity. If is the »width« of the distribution (e. g., the standard deviation or the inter-quartile range), then the number of units in a bin (the frequency) is of order and the relative standard error is of order . Comparing to the next bin, the relative change of the frequency is of order provided that the derivative of the density is non-zero. These two are of the same order if is of order , so that is of order .
This simple cubic root choice can also be applied to bins with non-constant width.
See also 
|Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Histograms|
- Data binning
- Freedman–Diaconis rule
- Image histogram
- Density estimation
- Kernel density estimation, a smoother but more complex method of density estimation
- Pareto chart
- Seven Basic Tools of Quality
- V-optimal histograms
- Pearson, K. (1895). "Contributions to the Mathematical Theory of Evolution. II. Skew Variation in Homogeneous Material". Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society A: Mathematical, Physical and Engineering Sciences 186: 343–414. Bibcode:1895RSPTA.186..343P. doi:10.1098/rsta.1895.0010.
- Howitt, D. and Cramer, D. (2008) Statistics in Psychology. Prentice Hall
- Charles Stangor (2011) "Research Methods For The Behavioral Sciences". Wadsworth, Cengage Learning. ISBN 9780840031976.
- Nancy R. Tague (2004). "Seven Basic Quality Tools". The Quality Toolbox. Milwaukee, Wisconsin: American Society for Quality. p. 15. Retrieved 2010-02-05.
- M. Eileen Magnello (December 2006). "Karl Pearson and the Origins of Modern Statistics: An Elastician becomes a Statistician". The New Zealand Journal for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. 1 volume. OCLC 682200824.
- US 2000 census.
- Dean, S., & Illowsky, B. (2009, February 19). Descriptive Statistics: Histogram. Retrieved from the Connexions Web site: http://cnx.org/content/m16298/1.11/
- Scott, David W. (1992). Multivariate Density Estimation: Theory, Practice, and Visualization. New York: John Wiley.
- Sturges, H. A. (1926). "The choice of a class interval". Journal of the American Statistical Association: 65–66. JSTOR 2965501.
- e.g. § 5.6 "Density Estimation", W. N. Venables and B. D. Ripley, Modern Applied Statistics with S (2002), Springer, 4th edition. ISBN 0-387-95457-0.
- Online Statistics Education: A Multimedia Course of Study (http://onlinestatbook.com/). Project Leader: David M. Lane, Rice University (chapter 2 "Graphing Distributions", section "Histograms")
- Doane DP (1976) Aesthetic frequency classiﬁcation. American Statistician, 30: 181–183
- Scott, David W. (1979). "On optimal and data-based histograms". Biometrika 66 (3): 605–610. doi:10.1093/biomet/66.3.605.
- Freedman, David; Diaconis, P. (1981). "On the histogram as a density estimator: L2 theory". Zeitschrift für Wahrscheinlichkeitstheorie und verwandte Gebiete 57 (4): 453–476. doi:10.1007/BF01025868.
- Shimazaki, H.; Shinomoto, S. (2007). "A method for selecting the bin size of a time histogram". Neural Computation 19 (6): 1503–1527. doi:10.1162/neco.2007.19.6.1503. PMID 17444758.
Further reading 
- Lancaster, H.O. An Introduction to Medical Statistics. John Wiley and Sons. 1974. ISBN 0-471-51250-8
|Look up histogram in Wiktionary, the free dictionary.|
- Journey To Work and Place Of Work (location of census document cited in example)
- Smooth histogram for signals and images from a few samples
- Histograms: Construction, Analysis and Understanding with external links and an application to particle Physics.
- A Method for Selecting the Bin Size of a Histogram
- Interactive histogram generator
- Matlab function to plot nice histograms
- Dynamic Histogram in MS Excel
- Histogram construction and manipulation using Java applets, and charts on SOCR