The above is a QuickTime movie that shows the same data getting binned progressively in bigger and bigger bins. The word “binning” or to “bin” data means to throw all the points between a certain range into a single bucket or bin. The purpose of binning data is to beat down the uncertainties and/or to gain some insight as to the average behavior. Before you hit play on the movie above you are seeing all of the data. As the movie plays you’ll see that we get less data points but also smaller error bars. So our temporal resolution gets worse but the uncertainty in the data points gets better.

 

The errors get beaten down very quickly. Your web browser may let you drag the little bar back and forth to examine the very beginning of the movie in more detail. You may be able to use your arrow keys to do this as well, especially if you download the movie to your hard drive. You’ll see that the error bars go way down very quickly as the bin size grows. (The bin size is the number in the upper right corner divided by 1000, so the first frame says ‘d1’ and has a bin size of 0.001 of phase. The last frame says ‘d100’ and has a bin size of 0.1 of phase.