On Sat, Oct 20, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Steven Boada <bo...@physics.tamu.edu> wrote: > It'd be cool if we could do something like > > bins = [(0.0,0.05,0.1),(0.05,0.1,0.15)...] > > Where I have specified the left edge, center and right edge of each > bin. Yeah, that'd be pretty slick. > > S > > On Sat Oct 20 16:21:41 2012, Steven Boada wrote: >> Let's say I generate a bunch of random numbers from 0-1. Then, I'd >> like to make a histogram of it. But here's the clincher. I'd like my >> bins to overlap a bit. For example, if the first bin is from 0 - 0.1, >> centered on 0.05, I'd like the next (second) bin to be centered on 0.1 >> and range from 0.05 - 0.15. >> >> So basically, I want the width of each bin to be greater than the >> spacing. >> >> Is this something that could be done with the histogram function? I >> did a couple of google searches and couldn't come up with anything >> meaningful. Apparently, 'rwidth' in the hist function just makes the >> displayed bars bigger or smaller. >> >> Any thoughts? >> > > -- > > Steven Boada > > Doctoral Student > Dept of Physics and Astronomy > Texas A&M University > bo...@physics.tamu.edu
My thoughts are that this goes against everything a histogram is set out to do; attempt to provide a 'discretised' probability distribution function given a set of discrete samples. Lets say a sample lies in the region where two bins overlap. How do you define which bin the sample lies in? Both? If both, how do you define the value of the approximated probability distribution on a bin? You could just take the height of the bin, but some of the bin's mass lies in each of the neighbouring bins. If you don't want to apply mass to the neighbouring bins for a sample that lies in the region where two bins overlap, you could just pick one. You then have the problem of non-uniqueness. If you'd picked the other bin you'd have a different probability distribution function. This a bad property to have. If you don't want to pick a neighbouring bin to apply more mass, and just increase the width of the each bin's matplotlib.patches.Patch object, then that is more sensible. Except now you have the problem of displaying the histogram. Which bin gets displayed over its left neighbour? And its right neighbour? I dread to think what this would imply if you also wanted to stack such histograms. A potential can of worms. -- Damon McDougall http://www.damon-is-a-geek.com B2.39 Mathematics Institute University of Warwick Coventry West Midlands CV4 7AL United Kingdom ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ Everyone hates slow websites. So do we. Make your web apps faster with AppDynamics Download AppDynamics Lite for free today: http://p.sf.net/sfu/appdyn_sfd2d_oct _______________________________________________ Matplotlib-users mailing list Matplotlib-users@lists.sourceforge.net https://lists.sourceforge.net/lists/listinfo/matplotlib-users
