Re:What's so hard about histograms?
by vanderZwan on Saturday July 22, 2017 @11:42AM
(#14827712)
If you're interested in histograms, I highly recommend "Expressing complex data aggregations with Histogrammar" by Jim Pivarski, where he talks about how for decades histograms have been used in unique ways to do amazing things in high energy physics (HEP, arguably the original Big Data field in compsci):
One thing early on is that HEP histograms treats histograms as a kind of accumulator that can stream in data (because the amount of data processed was typically too big to load into RAM all at once), instead of a chart. From that starting point you can add, divide, multiply histograms with histograms to build crazy things.
The results are no longer really histograms of course, but it's fun to see how something that we just think of as a chart can be (ab)used like that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mB4Chl0ly-g
One thing early on is that HEP histograms treats histograms as a kind of accumulator that can stream in data (because the amount of data processed was typically too big to load into RAM all at once), instead of a chart. From that starting point you can add, divide, multiply histograms with histograms to build crazy things.
The results are no longer really histograms of course, but it's fun to see how something that we just think of as a chart can be (ab)used like that.