Histogram Applet

This applet shows how widths (or the number of bins) affect a histogram. The histogram below is for the Old Faithful data set. The observations are the time (in seconds) between eruptions for the Old Faithful geyser in Yellowstone National Park. You can interactively change the bin width by dragging the arrow underneath the bin width scale. For large bin widths, the bimodal nature of the dataset is hidden, and for small bin widths the plot reduces to a spike at each data point. What bin width do you think provides the best picture of the underlying data?

You can use this applet to creat histogram for your own data. To know how, check my HTML source code of this page.