Python Business Intelligence Cookbook

Creating a histogram for a column

A histogram is a graph that shows the distribution of numerical data. The matplotlib Python library makes creating a histogram a snap. Here's how.

Getting ready

Before using this recipe, familiarize yourself with the following recipes as we'll be building on them:

• Creating a Pandas DataFrame from a MongoDB query
• Generating a frequency table for a single column by date

How to do it…

1. To create a histogram for a single column in a Pandas DataFrame, begin by importing all the required libraries. To show matplotlib plots in IPython Notebook, we will use an IPython magic function which starts with %:

   %matplotlib inline import pandas as pd import numpy as np from pymongo import MongoClient import matplotlib as mpl import matplotlib.pyplot ...