Other graphs of one-variable data

• Timeplot.
  Make a scatterplot with time along the horizontal axis and the values of the variable on the vertical axis. It may be awkward to get the labels for the time axis to be exactly what you want. Don't worry about that because the point of a timeplot is to see whether there is a pattern, and if there is, what sort of pattern. The typical patterns might be generally increasing over time, generally decreasing over time, cycles, or some combination of those. Or, of course, there may be no pattern at all.
  
  
  
• Bar graph of a quantitative variable.
  This is NOT a useful graph but students are often tempted to make it. Please do not make such a graph in a statistics course.
  Review the following example of a dataset, its histogram, and a bar graph of the values (from a spreadsheet.)
• The typical questions we want to answer about a dataset are: What are the center, shape, and spread? From which of these graphs can you more easily answer these questions?

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