Describe a Histogram

Learn how to describe a statistical distribution by considering its center, shape, spread, and outliers.

Start

Key Concepts

Review core concepts you need to learn to master this subject

Unimodal Distribution

Left-Skewed Dataset

Multimodal Dataset

Bimodal Dataset

Uniform Dataset

Right-skewed Dataset

Symmetric Distribution in Histogram

Dataset Outliers

Unimodal Distribution

Modality describes the number of peaks in a dataset. A unimodal distribution in a histogram means there is one distinct peak indicating the most frequent value in a histogram.

Describe a Histogram

Lesson 1 of 1

1
Introduction
At this point, you should be familiar with what a histogram displays. If you are not, take a few minutes to complete our lesson on histograms . In this lesson, we’re going to build on those skill…
Start
2
Center
One of the most common ways to summarize a dataset is to communicate its center. In this lesson, we will use average and median as our measures of centrality. Take the Codecademy lessons on averag…
Start
3
Spread
Once you’ve found the center of your data, you can shift to identifying the extremes of your dataset: the minimum and maximum values. These values, taken with the mean and median, begin to indicate…
Start
4
Skew
Once you have the center and range of your data, you can begin to describe its shape. The skew of a dataset is a description of the data’s symmetry. A dataset with one prominent peak, and similar …
Start
5
Modality
The modality describes the number of peaks in a dataset. Thus far, we have only looked at datasets with one distinct peak, known as unimodal. This is the most common. ![histogram](https://conten…
Start
6
Outliers
An outlier is a data point that is far away from the rest of the dataset. Ouliers do not have a formal definition, but are easy to determine by looking at histogram. The histogram below shows an ex…
Start
7
Review
In this lesson, you learned a framework for describing the distribution of a dataset, which includes the following five features: - Center - Spread - Skew - Modality - Outliers If you’re curious,…
Start