Plot a histogram such that the total height equals 1

by

When plotting a normalized histogram, the area under the curve should sum to 1, not the height.

In [44]:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
k=(3,3,3,3)
x, bins, p=plt.hist(k, density=True)  # used to be normed=True in older versions
from numpy import *
plt.xticks( arange(10) ) # 10 ticks on x axis
plt.show()  
In [45]:

print bins
[ 2.5  2.6  2.7  2.8  2.9  3.   3.1  3.2  3.3  3.4  3.5]

Here, this example, the bin width is 0.1, the area underneath the curve sums up to one (0.1*10).

x stores the height for each bins. p stores each of those individual bins objects (actually, they are patches. So we just sum up x and modify the height of each bin object.

To have the sum of height to be 1, add the following before plt.show():

for item in p:
    item.set_height(item.get_height()/sum(x))

enter image description here

Leave a Comment