A line chart shows the frequency of data occurring across a series of numbers. Line charts provide a quick and easy way to organize data and are often used when less than 25 different values are being compared. If you want to know how to build a line chart go to Step 1 to get started.
Steps
Step 1. Collect your data
The data will consist of the frequency with which a certain act or event occurs within a given set of people or things. For example, suppose 10 students in a third grade class were asked the following question: "How many books did you read during the summer holidays?". The data to consider are the amount of books that have been read by each student; it doesn't matter which student has read a certain number of books. What matters is how many books have been read. So, suppose you got the following ten answers about how many books were read during the holidays:
5, 1, 2, 5, 8, 0, 3, 2, 2, 1
Step 2. Organize the data in ascending order
Organizing the data from the smallest to the largest can be useful for interpreting them and having a greater sensitivity of the numbers and the range of the digits you are working with. Take the numbers you got for the books each student read and rearrange them from the smallest to the largest. You can scroll through all the numbers in the first list before writing the second. When you're done, check to make sure you always have the same amount of numbers (10). Here's what they should look like:
0, 1, 1, 2, 2, 2, 3, 5, 5, 8
Step 3. Draw a horizontal line
Check the data to find out which is the highest and lowest value. The smallest number is 0 and the largest is 8, so you will need to draw a horizontal line ranging from 0 to 8. If you are working with a wider range of numbers, then you will not have to mark every single digit. For our purposes, however, you can draw a horizontal line indicating the numbers from 0 to 8, going from left to right. It will necessarily look like this:
0 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8
Step 4. Mark an "X" above the horizontal line each time a data occurs
Then mark an X above the 0 since it occurs once, mark two Xs above the 1 because it occurs twice, mark three Xs above the 2 since it results three times, mark two Xs above the 5 because it occurs twice, and mark an X above the 8 as it occurs once. Now that you've created a line graph of how often the 10 student class has read a certain number of books, you can move on to interpreting the data.
Step 5. Interpret the data
Now that you've organized your data into a line chart, you can move on to analyzing some key components of the data. Here are the aspects that are usually taken into consideration when analyzing data in a line chart:
- The most recurring event. In this case, the most common event was reading 2 books during the summer, since "2 books" occurs more frequently than any other data in the aggregate.
- Outliers (outliers). "8" is an anomalous value since it deviates a lot from the other values and breaks the regularity of the most recurring number of books read by students.
- Gaps (empty). There are gaps between "3 books" and "5 books", and between "5 books" and "8 books."
- Clusters (concentrations). There is a concentration of data between "1 book" and "2 books", which means that many of the books that have been read fall within these categories.
