

This wikipedia page lists several methods for deciding bin width from the number of observations. If you have lots of values, your graph will look better and be more informative if you have lots of bins. The decision clearly depends on the number of values.

If you want to create a frequency distribution with equally spaced bins, you need to decide how many bins (or the width of each). Either a dot plot, or a cumulative frequency distribution, which doesn't require any bins.


One solution is to create a graph that shows every value. If you have too many bins, you get a broken comb look, which also doesn't give a sense of the distribution. You can now download the Excel template for free.īinomial distribution is among the topics included in the Quantitative Methods module of the CFA Level 1 Curriculum.If you use too few bins, the histogram doesn't really portray the data very well. This is an open-access Excel template in XLSX format that will be useful to anyone who wants to work as a Statistician, Business Intelligence Analyst, Data Scientist, Portfolio Manager, or Risk Manager. Other related topics you might be interested to explore are Normal distribution and Uniform distribution. If we wish to use the probability distribution formula, we need to plug in 3 for “y”, 5 for “n”, and 0.6 for “p”. With the probability distribution function, we can calculate the likelihood of the stock price increasing 3 times during the 5-work-day week. Historically, there is a 60% chance that the price of your stock will go up on any given day (that’s when the closing price is higher than the opening price), and a 40% chance it will drop. Suppose that you bought a single stock of General Motors. We use the letter “B” to express a Binomial distribution, followed by the number of trials and the probability of success in each one. Binomial events represent a sequence of identical Bernoulli events.
