Make histograms wider

[bwiernik]

The histograms in skim() are really narrow, making it very difficult to discern the data distribution. By comparison, the precis() function in the rethinking package (https://github.com/rmcelreath/rethinking) supplies histograms that are about 3 times as wide as the skim() histograms, and these are much more readable. Do you think you could make the histograms wider or provide something like a bins argument to specify how wide to make them?

[elinw]

Right, I think there are a fixed number of bins (8) and some people actually find it confusing that a "_" basically forces them to a width of 8 even if narrower. So I think that if we were going to change that function, we should also deal with that.
That said, you can always create your own version of the function.

[elinw]

It actually already has an nbins option, so you could modify your slf and use the same function with a different bin width.

https://github.com/ropensci/skimr/blob/master/R/stats.R#L84

new_hist <- function(x){
  inline_hist(x, 10)
}
my_skim <- skim_with(numeric = sfl(new_hist))
my_skim(iris)

skim_variable n_missing complete_rate mean sd p0 p25 p50 p75 1 Sepal.Length 0 1 5.84 0.828 4.3 5.1 5.8 6.4 2 Sepal.Width 0 1 3.06 0.436 2 2.8 3 3.3 3 Petal.Length 0 1 3.76 1.77 1 1.6 4.35 5.1 4 Petal.Width 0 1 1.20 0.762 0.1 0.3 1.3 1.8 p100 hist new_hist
1 7.9 ▆▇▇▅▂ ▂▇▅▇▆▆▅▂▂▂ 2 4.4 ▁▆▇▂▁ ▁▁▃▃▇▃▂▂▁▁ 3 6.9 ▇▁▆▇▂ ▇▃▁▁▂▆▆▃▂▁ 4 2.5 ▇▁▇▅▃ ▇▂▁▂▅▃▁▅▂▃

[bwiernik]

Would you be open to exposing the nbins argument in the default skim() function?

[michaelquinn32]

Thanks for the suggestion! Unfortunately, this isn't really how skimr works. We have a way to customize the hist function that works the same way for all of the other functions that skimr uses.