Clojure for Data Science

Binning data

To develop an intuition for what these various calculations of variance are measuring, we can employ a technique called binning. Where data is continuous, using frequencies (as we did with the election data to count the nils) is not practical since no two values may be the same. However, it's possible to get a broad sense of the structure of the data by grouping the data into discrete intervals.

The process of binning is to divide the range of values into a number of consecutive, equally-sized, smaller bins. Each value in the original series falls into exactly one bin. By counting the number of points falling into each bin, we can get a sense of the spread of the data:

The preceding illustration shows fifteen values of x split into ...