6.6 Describing a histogram

Things to note in your description of a histogram:

  • Is it roughly symmetric or is it negatively or positively skewed?
  • Is it roughly bell-shaped?
  • Outliers - are there observations (bars) showing up far from the others?
  • Are there multiple modes?

So, let’s look again at the penguin body mass histogram, and provide a description thereafter:

ggplot(data = penguins, aes(x = body_mass_g)) +
  geom_histogram(binwidth = 500, colour = "black", fill = "lightgrey") +
  xlab("Body mass (g)") +
  ylab("Frequency") +
  theme_bw()
Histogram of body mass (g) for 342 penguins

Figure 6.5: Histogram of body mass (g) for 342 penguins

The histogram is moderately positively skewed and thus asymmetric, with a single mode near 3500g. There are no obvious outliers in the distribution.

  1. Histogram: Create a histogram of the bill lengths of penguins in the penguins dataset, and include an appropriate figure caption. Then provide a description of what you see.