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Exercise

Build a histogram (2): bins

In the previous exercise, you didn't specify the number of bins. By default, Python sets the number of bins to 10 in that case. The number of bins is pretty important. Too few bins will oversimplify reality and won't show you the details. Too many bins will overcomplicate reality and won't show the bigger picture.

To control the number of bins to divide your data in, you can set the bins argument.

That's exactly what you'll do in this exercise. You'll be making two plots here. The code in the script already includes plt.show() and plt.clf() calls; plt.show() displays a plot; plt.clf() cleans it up again so you can start afresh.

As before, life_exp is available and matplotlib.pyplot is imported as plt.

Instructions

100 XP
  • Build a histogram of life_exp, with 5 bins. Can you tell which bin contains the most observations?
  • Build another histogram of life_exp, this time with 20 bins. Is this better?