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It's also often useful to think of the true distribution of the underlying system/dynamic in question, and to consider a histogram as a sample that therefore ha
by redcalx 11y ago
It's also often useful to think of the true distribution of the underlying system/dynamic in question, and to consider a histogram as a sample that therefore has sample error. E.g. if the histogram's tail bins have very few samples then they're giving you some information about the shape of the distribution in that region, but not the exact probability of events in that region.
- xaprb 11y agoThis is an excellent point. The distribution of the measurements are the distribution of the sample, not of the population. In my experience very few non-statisticians understand the difference. Statistics is hard.
- Xcelerate 11y agoThis is true. I almost mentioned the difficulties of estimating the kernel density bandwidth in my original post, but thought that would be getting too far on a tangent.