Dealing with histograms, what are “classes”?
Classes are how we separate our data. In a histogram, it is the range of each bar.
Let’s look at the example from the mini-lecture:
If this is our data: 12 6 8 7 3 3 15 13 9 5
We can make different classes to group what we found. I used four different classes in the mini-lecture. I could have used more or less too.
I could have done these three classes: 1 – 5, 6 – 10, 11 – 15
The important thing to look out for is to have the same WIDTH for each of the classes. Each of these three classes is a width of 5.
What is we used only one class? This would mean all of the data would be in the one class. The histogram would just be one rectangle and it would not be helpful. The amount of classes is an important factor on how we view the data set.
I believe when you do the spreadsheet assignment you might get a better hang of this! I ask you to use a width of 3 and comment on whether or not you thought that was a good idea.