Histogram misbehaving

[Cyrus Grout]

I was plotting the simplest of histograms (observations by year) in Stata 14 and finding that the histogram plot was lumping the last year (2016) into the next-to-last year (2015). For example, the following code generates the tabulation and histogram below. What is going on here?

clear all
set obs 200
set seed 10
gen year = floor(runiform(2010,2017))
tab year
histogram year, start(2010) width(1)

[Nick Cox]

 histogram year, discrete

solves this problem while also helpfully producing more natural centred (centered) labels. For your example I would want to add further options

xla(2010/2016, noticks) xtitle("")

as there is enough space to label every year; ticks no longer seem needed; and the reader who needs a title "year" is probably in the wrong field.

[Rich Goldstein]

try using the "discrete" option as in:

histogram year, discrete w(1)

[Cyrus Grout]

Thanks, Nick and Rich.

The discrete option prevents the improper binning of 2016 into 2015 and I can see that it is worthwhile to specify whether one's data discrete or continuous. Nonetheless, if the histogram options start(#) and width(#) function in the way the documentation suggests, I'm perplexed by the final bin seeming to be defined differently than the preceding bins.

[Nick Cox]

#4 I agree. I have to wonder whether there is small bug somewhere.

Note that

histogram year, start(2009.5) width(1) freq

works fine.