Assume a survey plot that shows a histogram of percentages of respondent's answers, like the following which shows "Percentages of respondents' answers for five tornado warning behaviors across six lead time and daylight scenarios":
Do error bars make any sense for a plot like that? As far as I know, error bars are useful only when showing averages or median values.
Best Answer
This is not a histogram, but a barchart meant for visualising absolute and relative frequencies between different groups and subgroups. A histogram is a visualisation of a univariate numeric variable which is created by splitting the variable's range into intervals and plotting the absolute or relative frequencies in the style of a barchart. It is meant to approximate the density function. It makes absolute sense to add error bars to a barchart, such as your graph. However, adding error bars to a histogram is unreasonable, as these 'pointwise' error bars do not improve the 'overall' density approximation which the histogram should illustrate.
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