# Frequency distribution and histograms - Graphing Data

## What is frequency distribution?

Frequency is a measure of how many times a certain event occurs. In math and data, we may have lists of numbers after carrying out research. Amongst the list, certain numbers may occur more than once. Therefore, the frequency of that number happens more than once. When you list out the different frequencies in a table, you’ll get a frequency distribution table!

To put the frequency distribution definition into more mathematical terms, frequency distribution is a way to orderly sort data based on the magnitude of the observations. It’s a way to summarize and present data effectively.

We’re going to be dealing with sorting numbers into frequency distribution tables in this lesson. Before we do that, we’ll teach you some terms that you’ll need to reference when it comes to frequency distribution tables. They are the following.

Classes: Observations are usually classified into groups called classes or a class interval.

Class Limits: This refers to the smallest to largest possible values in a class. For example, if the smallest number in a class was 5 and the largest was a 25, then the class limit are 5 and 25. In this case, 5 is called the lower class limit and the 25 is the upper class limit.

Midpoint of each class: This is the mid value of each class and can be found with the formula:

(lower limit + upper limit)/2

Magnitude of a class interval: This shows the difference between the lower and upper limit of a class. For our previous example with a lower class limit of 5 and an upper class limit of 25, the magnitude would’ve been 20.

Class frequency: This is the number of times an observation of an event happens in a class interval.

Keeping the above terms in mind, you can now properly explain different aspects of a frequency distribution table.

## How to find frequency distribution

What info do we need to know in order to find frequency distribution and make a frequency table? Let’s pretend that there are several restaurants: Sobway, MacDoonalds, and Burger Kong. You then go ahead and ask you friends which between the three they like better.

Let’s say 7 of your friends like Sobway. 9 of your friends respond that they like MacDoonalds. The remaining 4 said that they liked Burger Kong.

 Restaurant Number of friends who prefer restaurant Sobway ||||| || MacDoonalds ||||| |||| Burger Kong ||||

As you can see, this table above is a good way to represent how many of your friends like which restaurants. You can see clearly how many people like each of the different restaurants all in one place. This is actually a frequency distribution table! It can tell you how many things fit into a certain class. Here, our classes refer to our restaurants.

With this info, you can then do more things with the data. For example, displaying the data in a histogram, pie chart, or line chart are some of the many methods you can use to show the information in a visual manner. This will be explored more in future lessons.