Histogram Applet

This applet is designed to teach students how bin widths (or the number of bins) affect a histogram. The histogram below is for the Old Faithful data set. Students should 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 now include an interactive histogram in your HTML documents by using the above applet with different parameters. The APPLET tag should look something like

<APPLET codebase="http://www.stat.sc.edu/~west/javahtml/classes" code="Histogram.class" width=500 height=500>

<PARAM name=data value=" YOUR_DATA ">

<PARAM name=title value="YOUR_TITLE">

</APPLET>

You should look at the document source for this page if you need some help. Please let me know if you have any problems with the applet.


by R. Webster West, Dept. of Statistics, Univ. of South Carolina
west@stat.sc.edu