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Viewing the distribution of data over intervals with a histogram

This example shows how to make a histogram to the distribution of data over intervals, using weather data.

Histogram with the dimension Average of the 24 hourly temperature observations in degrees Celsius.

Dataset

In this example, we'll use the following weather data.

  • Location: Sweden > Gällivare Airport
  • Date range: all data from 2010 to 2017
  • Measurement: Average of the 24 hourly temperature observations in degrees Celsius

The dataset that is loaded contains a daily average temperature measurement from a weather station in the north of Sweden during the time period of 2010 to 2017.

Visualization

We add a histogram to the sheet and add the field Average of the 24 hourly temperature observations in degrees Celsius as dimension.

The visualization creates a frequency measure automatically, and sorts the temperature measurements into a number of bars according to frequency distribution.

We can adjust the size of the bars to get even intervals in the advanced edit mode, by setting Bars to Custom and Bar width (x-axis) with a width of 5. This adjusts the bars to be intervals of 5 degrees Celsius as shown below:

Histogram with the dimension Average of the 24 hourly temperature observations in degrees Celsius.

Discovery

The histogram visualizes the frequency distribution of the temperature measurements. You can hover the mouse over a bar to see more details of the frequency.

We can see that most days, the temperature is between -5 and 15 degrees Celsius. There are days below -30, but they are not many.

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