Data Scientists: STOP Randomly Binning Histograms

Bryce Macher
Analytics Vidhya
Published in
4 min readSep 23, 2019

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A histogram with 10 bins. Because why not 10? It’s what my data viz instructor told me to do…

Histograms are a crucial part of Exploratory Data Analysis. They save us from being tricked by something like “On average, our widgets reach 1000 people.” That’s a great average! But what’s the range? Distribution? Standard deviation? Variance? These can all be answered through one simple visualization: a histogram.

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Bryce Macher
Analytics Vidhya

Data leader for nearly 20y. Driving Applied ML/Science @ NBCU. Motorcycle guy. Ex- WarnerMedia, Discovery, Snowflake, BAH, Hilton, UMD Professor.