EDUCATION & TRAINING
How to Mathematically Choose the Optimal Bins for Your Histogram
Towards Data Science
About This Tutorial
Choosing optimal bins for a histogram is crucial for data visualization, especially when the histogram is used for further analysis. Historically, the choice of bins has been based on intuition, but a rigorous mathematical approach can provide a accurate solution. Inspired by perturbation theory in physics and Taylor expansions in mathematics, researchers have developed a method to construct densities by scaling the resolution of the histogram based on the size of the dataset. This approach is particularly relevant for large datasets, where a low-resolution histogram can be misleading.