Is there a clean way to generate a line histogram chart in Python?

Question

I need to create a histogram that plots a line and not a step or bar chart. I am using python 2.7 The plt.hist function below plots a stepped line and the bins don\'t line up i

Answer 1

The line plot you are producing does not line up as the x values being used are the bin edges. You can calculate the bin centers as follows: bin_centers = 0.5*(x[1:]+x[:-1]) Then the complete code would be:

noise = np.random.normal(0,1,(1000,1))
n,x,_ = plt.hist(noise, bins = np.linspace(-3,3,7), histtype=u'step' )
bin_centers = 0.5*(x[1:]+x[:-1])
plt.plot(bin_centers,n) ## using bin_centers rather than edges
plt.show()

If you want the plot filled to y=0 then use plt.fill_between(bin_centers,n)