Histogram versus Bar Plot

From Open Risk Manual
Revision as of 16:37, 13 October 2020 by Wiki admin (talk | contribs)
(diff) ← Older revision | Latest revision (diff) | Newer revision → (diff)

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

See Also