pylab.hist(data, normed=1). Normalization seems to work incorrect

Question

I\'m trying to create a histogram with argument normed=1

For instance:

import pylab

data = ([1,1,2,3,3,3,3,3,4,5.1])    
pylab.hist(data, normed=1)
         


        

Answer 1

According to documentation normed: If True, the result is the value of the probability density function at the bin, normalized such that the integral over the range is 1. Note that the sum of the histogram values will not be equal to 1 unless bins of unity width are chosen; it is not a probability mass function. This is from numpy doc, but should be the same for pylab.

In []: data= array([1,1,2,3,3,3,3,3,4,5.1])
In []: counts, bins= histogram(data, normed= True)
In []: counts
Out[]: array([ 0.488,  0.,  0.244,  0.,  1.22,  0.,  0.,  0.244,  0.,  0.244])
In []: sum(counts* diff(bins))
Out[]: 0.99999999999999989

So simply normalization is done according to the documentation like:

In []: counts, bins= histogram(data, normed= False)
In []: counts
Out[]: array([2, 0, 1, 0, 5, 0, 0, 1, 0, 1])
In []: counts_n= counts/ sum(counts* diff(bins))
In []: counts_n
Out[]: array([ 0.488,  0.,  0.244,  0.,  1.22 ,  0.,  0.,  0.244,  0.,  0.244])