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3 Best (Often Better) Alternatives To Histograms
Avoid the most dangerous pitfall of histograms
Published in
10 min readSep 12, 2023
Binning Bias, The Biggest Flaw of Histograms
Histograms are probably the first plot you might have used as you embark on your journey as a data scientist. They are intuitive and easy plots to understand the shapes of distributions.
However, as you progress through your journey, you will find that histograms are not so peachy. Histograms group the values into intervals called bins, and the height of each bin in a histogram tells the number of points in that bin. Consider this example:
From this histogram, we can immediately see that most scores are between 60 and 80. Let’s see what happens if we change the number of bins from 10 to 20:
Still, the previous trend is apparent. Let’s keep changing, this time from 20 to 40:
