How to plot a histogram using Matplotlib in Python with a list of data?

Question

I am trying to plot a histogram using the matplotlib.hist() function but I am not sure how to do it.

I have a list

probability = [0.360         


        

Answer 1

This is an old question but none of the previous answers has addressed the real issue, i.e. that fact that the problem is with the question itself.

First, if the probabilities have been already calculated, i.e. the histogram aggregated data is available in a normalized way then the probabilities should add up to 1. They obviously do not and that means that something is wrong here, either with terminology or with the data or in the way the question is asked.

Second, the fact that the labels are provided (and not intervals) would normally mean that the probabilities are of categorical response variable - and a use of a bar plot for plotting the histogram is best (or some hacking of the pyplot's hist method), Shayan Shafiq's answer provides the code.

However, see issue 1, those probabilities are not correct and using bar plot in this case as "histogram" would be wrong because it does not tell the story of univariate distribution, for some reason (perhaps the classes are overlapping and observations are counted multiple times?) and such plot should not be called a histogram in this case.

Histogram is by definition a graphical representation of the distribution of univariate variable (see https://www.itl.nist.gov/div898/handbook/eda/section3/histogra.htm , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram ) and is created by drawing bars of sizes representing counts or frequencies of observations in selected classes of the variable of interest. If the variable is measured on a continuous scale those classes are bins (intervals). Important part of histogram creation procedure is making a choice of how to group (or keep without grouping) the categories of responses for a categorical variable, or how to split the domain of possible values into intervals (where to put the bin boundaries) for continuous type variable. All observations should be represented, and each one only once in the plot. That means that the sum of the bar sizes should be equal to the total count of observation (or their areas in case of the variable widths, which is a less common approach). Or, if the histogram is normalised then all probabilities must add up to 1.

If the data itself is a list of "probabilities" as a response, i.e. the observations are probability values (of something) for each object of study then the best answer is simply plt.hist(probability) with maybe binning option, and use of x-labels already available is suspicious.

Then bar plot should not be used as histogram but rather simply

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
probability = [0.3602150537634409, 0.42028985507246375, 
  0.373117033603708, 0.36813186813186816, 0.32517482517482516, 
  0.4175257731958763, 0.41025641025641024, 0.39408866995073893, 
  0.4143222506393862, 0.34, 0.391025641025641, 0.3130841121495327, 
  0.35398230088495575]
plt.hist(probability)
plt.show()

with the results

matplotlib in such case arrives by default with the following histogram values

(array([1., 1., 1., 1., 1., 2., 0., 2., 0., 4.]),
 array([0.31308411, 0.32380469, 0.33452526, 0.34524584, 0.35596641,
        0.36668698, 0.37740756, 0.38812813, 0.39884871, 0.40956928,
        0.42028986]),
 )

the result is a tuple of arrays, the first array contains observation counts, i.e. what will be shown against the y-axis of the plot (they add up to 13, total number of observations) and the second array are the interval boundaries for x-axis.

One can check they they are equally spaced,

x = plt.hist(probability)[1]
for left, right in zip(x[:-1], x[1:]):
  print(left, right, right-left)

Or, for example for 3 bins (my judgment call for 13 observations) one would get this histogram

plt.hist(probability, bins=3)

with the plot data "behind the bars" being

The author of the question needs to clarify what is the meaning of the "probability" list of values - is the "probability" just a name of the response variable (then why are there x-labels ready for the histogram, it makes no sense), or are the list values the probabilities calculated from the data (then the fact they do not add up to 1 makes no sense).