Profile Histogram

A profile histogram provides an economic representation of two-dimensional (X vs Y) data. Unlike a two-dimensional histogram, the profile histogram is unbounded in the Y (vertical) dimension. Like any histogram, it has discrete bins along the X axis to aggregate the data. The data are represented graphically as a series of (X,Y) points on a plot, with the point position in Y corresponding to the mean and the vertical bars typically indicating the measure of the spread such as the RMS, or the measure of the precision of the mean, whereby larger bars correspond to less precision.

None of the projection techniques is perfect, since the reduction of information involved in all projections is not guaranteed to be “intelligent”. But they do solve the problem, even though it is necessary to look from more than one point of view and try more than one path to optimization.