jackHI: your new histogram tool¶

jackHI (/jak-ee/) is a software suite that contains functions to aid the creation of data-driven histograms.

The histograms are generated based on a non-arbitrary choice of binning developed in Hogg (2008), who state that the histogram is a sampling of a probability distribution function. A histogram can therefore be thought of as providing an estimate or model of that probability distribution function.

jackHI utilizes this probability model to construct a jackknife or leave-one-out cross validation likelihood that is maximized. The parameters associated with this maximized likelihood are then the optimal binning parameters for the histogram.