Statistics Interview Question: What kind of graphics can only be used for a single numeric value?

Crystal X
3 min readAug 29, 2024

In an earlier blog post I discussed which graphics can be used for a single categorical value, and that post can be found here:- https://medium.com/@tracyrenee61/statistics-interview-question-which-graphics-can-only-be-used-for-a-single-categorical-value-287529968325

In this post I am going to discuss what kind of graphs can only be used for a single numeric value. I carried out a bit of research and came to the conclusion that the graphics that can be used for a single numeric value are:-

  1. Histogram
  2. Kernel density estimate plot
  3. Dot plot

Histogram

A histogram is a chart that plots the distribution of numeric variables as a series of bars. Each bar typically covers a range of numeric values called a bin. A bar’s height covers a frequency of data points with a value within the corresponding bin.

Below is a histogram created using Python’s graphic library, matplotlib.pyplot. The histogram is a visual representation of the sepal width of the iris dataset. There are twelve bins in this histogram, which more fully aligns it with the the other graphics depicted in this blog post:-

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Crystal X
Crystal X

Written by Crystal X

I have over five decades experience in the world of work, being in fast food, the military, business, non-profits, and the healthcare sector.

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