waiting

The waiting times between eruptions at the Old Faithful gyser in minutes

eruptions

The length of the eruptions at the Old Faithful gyser in minutes

Extended information on the app

This app helps you explore the built-in old faithful dataset in R. This is one of the cannonical datasets in R and it's used in the 'hello' app for shiny to help introduce you to the paragigm.

This basic app lets you change several aspects of the way the eruption data is displayed and also what aspects are displayed. You can choose to show length of eruptions or time between eruptions. You can also select the number of bins to display on the output histogram.

It also helps show the influence of the number of bins that you choose to display on your interpretation of the data. If you choose too many bins the data looks excessively 'bumpy' if you choose too few, then you don't show the detail in the data. In either case, random chance will sometimes make it look like there is a 'spike' in the data at certain bin numbers when we wouldn't necessarily have that interpretation if we have all of the data.

This bin width selection is based on the Diaconis method. You should use it versus the sturges method as described in this article by a grumpy Australian professor.