Creating Plots That Present Summary Statistics of Your Data

It's now time for a switch to our next section. When datasets are huge, it is sometimes useful to look at the summary statistics of a range of different features and get a preliminary idea of the dataset. For example, the summary statistics for any numerical feature include measures of central tendency, such as the mean, and measures of dispersion, such as the standard deviation.

When a dataset is too small, plots presenting summary statistics may actually be misleading because summary statistics are meaningful only when the dataset is big enough to draw statistical conclusions. For example, if somebody reports the variance of a feature using five data points, we cannot make any concrete conclusions regarding the dispersion of the feature.

Histogram Revisited

Let's revisit histograms from Chapter 1, Introduction to Visualization with Python – Basic and Customized Plotting. Although histograms show...