numpy histogram cumulative density does not sum to 1

Question

Taking a tip from another thread (@EnricoGiampieri\'s answer to cumulative distribution plots python), I wrote:

# plot cumulative density function of nearest         


        

Answer 1

You need to make sure your bins are all width 1. That is:

np.all(np.diff(base)==1)

To achieve this, you have to manually specify your bins:

bins = np.arange(np.floor(nearest.min()),np.ceil(nearest.max()))
values, base = np.histogram(nearest, bins=bins, density=1)

And you get:

In [18]: np.all(np.diff(base)==1)
Out[18]: True

In [19]: np.sum(values)
Out[19]: 0.99999999999999989

Answer 2

You can simply normalize your values variable yourself like so:

unity_values = values / values.sum()

A full example would look something like this:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

x = np.random.normal(size=37)
density, bins = np.histogram(x, normed=True, density=True)
unity_density = density / density.sum()

fig, ((ax1, ax2), (ax3, ax4)) = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, sharex=True, figsize=(8,4))
widths = bins[:-1] - bins[1:]
ax1.bar(bins[1:], density, width=widths)
ax2.bar(bins[1:], density.cumsum(), width=widths)

ax3.bar(bins[1:], unity_density, width=widths)
ax4.bar(bins[1:], unity_density.cumsum(), width=widths)

ax1.set_ylabel('Not normalized')
ax3.set_ylabel('Normalized')
ax3.set_xlabel('PDFs')
ax4.set_xlabel('CDFs')
fig.tight_layout()