matplotlib Plotting Cookbook

Plotting histograms

Histograms are graphical representations of a probability distribution. In fact, a histogram is just a specific kind of a bar chart. We could easily use matplotlib's bar chart function and do some statistics to generate histograms. However, histograms are so useful that matplotlib provides a function just for them. In this recipe, we are going to see how to use this histogram function.

How to do it...

The following script draws 1000 values from a normal distribution and then generates histograms with 20 bins:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

X = np.random.randn(1000)

plt.hist(X, bins = 20)
plt.show()

The histogram will change a bit each time we run the script as the dataset is randomly generated. The preceding ...