Histogram versus Bar Plot
From Open Risk Manual
Histogram versus Bar Plot
Histograms are visualizations of frequency (probability) distributions of suitable binned numerical variables. Bar Plots are instead visualizations of the different values of a Categorical Variable.
While superficially the apperance is the same, histograms and bar plots have quite different semantics:
- In a histogram, the number of bins is variable (user defined) but their ordering is not
- In categorical variable bar plot, the number of bars is given (the distinct values of the variable) but their ordering is arbitrary.
- Many of the probabilistic concepts that one can read from a histogram (the overall shape and properties of the distribution) are not meaningful for a bar plot.
- In general the height of the bar in a bar plot will not have the meaning of a frequency
