Statistics Question

Question

Describe the difference in appearance between a bar graph and a histogram and describe the circumstances in which each type of graph is used?

Answer 1

Circumstances for Use:

Histograms are used to show distributions of variables while bar charts are used to compare variables.

Histograms plot quantitative data with ranges of the data grouped into bins or intervals while bar charts plot categorical data.

Histograms deal with continuous values, and bar charts deal with discrete values.

An example of when to use each:

Bar Chart-Used in plotting the sales of each of a store's products. In this example the categories are the products (ex. Shirts, Pants, Hats, etc.) and the bar's values reflect the total sales (ex. $5, $100.12, etc) of that product.

Histogram- Used in plotting the height's of females in your class. The bins would be intervals/groupings of heights (ex. >50 inches, 51-55 inches, 56-60 inches, 61-65 inches, etc) and the bars would be the number of students that would qualify to be counted in that interval (ex. 5, 6, 7)

Difference In Appearance:

This difference in appearance between the two types are graphs is that histograms have the bars touching and with bar charts the bars have a space between them.

Bar charts can be drawn with the bars going vertically or horizontally, this is something a histogram cannot do; a histogram can only be drawn with vertical bars.

Answer 2

Histograph compares 2 quantities