5.2 Interpreting Histograms - Video

Key Ideas

  • An important feature of a histogram is its overall shape. Although there are many shapes and overall patterns, a distribution may be symmetric, or it may be skewed to the right or skewed to the left.
  • Another way to describe a distribution is by its center. For now, we can think of the center of a distribution as the midpoint.
  • Another way to describe a distribution is by its extreme values. The smallest and largest observations often yield important information.
  • In a distribution, we may also observe outliers; that is, a piece or pieces of data that fall outside the overall pattern. Oftentimes determining an outlier is a matter of judgment. There are no hard and fast rules for determining outliers.