What is nbins in Plotly

Question

I couldn't find this in the documents. The plotly Graphing Libraries have the below example but didn't seem to explain its arguments.

import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.tips()
fig = px.histogram(df, x="total_bill", nbins=20)
fig.show()

produced the plot below:

From the plot, it doesn't look like the number of bins. Neither does it reflect the bin value interval nor counts in each bin. What does nbins=20 mean?

Answer 1

That is the maximum not the fixed number of bins that you can set. From elsewhere in the documentation:

"This value will be used in an algorithm that will decide the optimal bin size such that the histogram best visualizes the distribution of the data"