Mastering Python for Finance - Second Edition

Plotting a histogram

Histograms tell us how distributed data is. In this example, we are interested in how distributed the daily returns of ABN are. We use the hist() method on a DataFrame with a bin size of 50:

In [ ]:    daily_changes.hist(bins=50, figsize=(8, 4));

The histogram output is shown as follows:

When there are multiple data columns in a pandas DataFrame, the hist() method will automatically plot each histogram on its own separate plot.

We can use the describe() method to summarize the central tendency, dispersion, and shape of a dataset's distribution:

In [ ]:    daily_changes.describe()Out[ ]:                 Last    count  692.000000    mean     0.000499 std ...