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How many bins should be put in a regularhistogram

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 January 2006

Lucien Birgé  and
Yves Rozenholc
Lucien Birgé
Affiliation:
UMR 7599 “Probabilités et modèles aléatoires", Laboratoire de Probabilités, boîte 188, Université Paris VI, 4 Place Jussieu, 75252 Paris Cedex 05, France; [email protected];
Yves Rozenholc
Affiliation:
MAP5-UMR CNRS 8145, Université Paris 5, 45 rue des Saints-Pères, 75270 Paris Cedex 06, France; [email protected]
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Abstract

Given an n-sample from some unknown density f on [0,1], it is easy to construct anhistogram of the data based on some given partition of [0,1], but not so much is knownabout an optimal choice of the partition, especially when the data set is not large, even ifone restricts to partitions into intervals of equal length. Existing methods are either rulesof thumbs or based on asymptotic considerations and often involve some smoothnessproperties of f. Our purpose in this paper is to give an automatic, easy to program andefficient method to choose the number of bins of the partition from the data. It is based on boundson the risk of penalized maximum likelihood estimators due to Castellan and heavy simulationswhich allowed us to optimize the form of the penalty function. These simulations show that themethod works quite well for sample sizes as small as 25.

Keywords

Regular histogramsdensity estimationpenalized maximum likelihoodmodel selection.
Type
Research Article
Information
ESAIM: Probability and Statistics , Volume 10 , February 2006 , pp. 24 - 45
Copyright
© EDP Sciences, SMAI, 2006

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