Back-to-Back Histogram with Excel Tutorial

Dataset to Make a Back-to-Back Histogram with XLSTAT

The data comes from the Howell1 dataset, it is demographic data of the people of the Kalahari !Kung San collected by Nancy Howell. In this dataset, we have the weight and height measurements, age and sex of 544 people living in the Kalahari.
In this tutorial, we are going to focus on the age of the people interviewed by creating a population pyramid which will make it very easy to represent the distribution by age and sex of this population and thus have clues on the birth rate and mortality of this population.

Setting Up the Back-to-Back Histogram Feature in XLSTAT

• Open XLSTAT.

• Select the XLSTAT/ Visualizing data / Tornado diagram. The dialog box pops up.

• In the XLSTAT interface, select histogram in the format.

• Select the age columns in the data field.

• Select the sex columns in the groups field.

• Click on OK.

Interpret the Results of the Back-to-Back Histogram

First, descriptive statistics on the entered variables are displayed.
Next, the back-to-back histogram is displayed.
 
The first thing that we can notice is that the graph is rather symmetrical, so we can know directly that the population is well distributed in terms of gender.
Then, the graph has a pyramidal shape, there are many young people, and the older the population, the lower the numbers. We could therefore deduce that, in this population, the birth rate is high, but so is the mortality.
This dataset also includes the height and weight of people, and it could be interesting to go further in the analysis by also comparing that data.