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Histograms

One-dimensional histograms are accessed through the function histogram and its mutating variant histogram!. We will use the default GR backend on this page.

The most basic plot of a histogram is that of a vector of random numbers sampled from the unit normal distribution.

using Plots

x = randn(10^3)
histogram(x)
Example block output

The default number of bins is determined by the Freedman-Diaconis rule. You can select other bin algorithms using the attribute bins, which can take on values like :sqrt, or :scott for Scott's rule. Alternatively, you can pass in a range to more precisely control the number of bins and their minimum and maximum. For example, to plot 20 bins from -5 to +5, type

range(-5, 5, length=21)

where we have to add 1 to the length because the length counts the number of bin boundaries. Finally, you can also pass in an integer, like bins=15, but this will only be an approximation and the actual number of bins may vary.

Normalization

It is often desirable to normalize the histogram in some way. To do this, the normalize attribute is used, and we want normalize=:pdf (or :true) to normalize the total area of the bins to 1. Since we sampled from the normal distribution, we may as well plot it too. Of course, other common attributes like the title, axis labels, and colors can be changed as well.

p(x) = 1/sqrt(2pi) * exp(-x^2/2)
b_range = range(-5, 5, length=21)

histogram(x, label="Experimental", bins=b_range, normalize=:pdf, color=:gray)
plot!(p, label="Analytical", lw=3, color=:red)
xlims!(-5, 5)
ylims!(0, 0.4)
title!("Normal distribution, 1000 samples")
xlabel!("x")
ylabel!("P(x)")
Example block output

normalize can take on other values, including:

  • :probability, which sums all the bin heights to 1
  • :density, which makes the area of each bin equal to the counts

Weighted Histograms

Another common feature is to weight the values in x. Say that x consists of data sampled from a uniform distribution and we wanted to weight the values according to an exponential function. We would pass in a vector of weights of the same length as x. To check that the weighting is done correctly, we plot the exponential function multiplied by a normalization factor.

f_exp(x) = exp(x)/(exp(1)-1)

x = rand(10^4)
w = exp.(x)

histogram(x, label="Experimental", bins=:scott, weights=w, normalize=:pdf, color=:gray)
plot!(f_exp, label="Analytical", lw=3, color=:red)
plot!(legend=:topleft)
xlims!(0, 1.0)
ylims!(0, 1.6)
title!("Uniform distribution, weighted by exp(x)")
xlabel!("x")
ylabel!("P(x)")
Example block output

Other Variations

  • Histogram scatter plots can be made via scatterhist and scatterhist!, where points substitute in for bars.
  • Histogram step plots can be made via stephist and stephist!, where an outline substitutes in for bars.
p1 = histogram(x, title="Bar")
p2 = scatterhist(x, title="Scatter")
p3 = stephist(x, title="Step")
plot(p1, p2, p3, layout=(1, 3), legend=false)
Example block output

Note that the Y axis of the histogram scatter plot will not start from 0 by default.

2D Histograms

Two-dimensional histograms are accessed through the function histogram2d and its mutating variant histogram2d!. To plot them, two vectors x and y of the same length are needed.

The histogram is plotted in 2D as a heatmap instead of as 3D bars. The default colormap is :inferno, as with contour plots and heatmaps. Bins without any count are not plotted at all by default.

x = randn(10^4)
y = randn(10^4)
histogram2d(x, y)
Example block output

Things like custom bin numbers, weights, and normalization work in 2D, along with changing things like the colormap. However, the bin numbers need to be passed in via tuples; if only one number is passed in for the bins, for example, it is assumed that both axes will set the same number of bins. Additionally, the weights only accept a single vector for the x values.

Not plotting the bins at all may not be visually appealing, especially if a colormap is used with dark colors on the low end. To rectify this, use the attribute show_empty_bins=true.

w = exp.(x)
histogram2d(x, y, bins=(40, 20), show_empty_bins=true,
    normalize=:pdf, weights=w, color=:plasma)
title!("Normalized 2D Histogram")
xlabel!("x")
ylabel!("y")
Example block output