bar chart

bar chart
A graphic means of displaying a frequency distribution of nominal, ordinal, or grouped continuous data. Blocks proportional in width to the size of the categories are raised along the horizontal axis. The height of each block is then adjusted so that its area is proportional to the relative frequency of its category. The diagram thus appears as a series of bars of varying height, as in the hypothetical example in Figure 1, which shows the number of births in a county hospital for each day of the week. Conventionally, the frequency is shown at the top of each bar, and only values which actually occur are represented. (For example, if there had been no births on Monday, no space would have been left for that day.)

Other graphic methods of displaying data include the histogram and frequency polygon. The former is a graph showing interval-level or ratio-level data, consisting of contiguous lines or bars of a...

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