Pyplot - Visualize histogram of a list

Question

Given a simple list of negative values: l = [0, -1, -1, -1, -10, -100]

What's the fastest way to visualize its histogram with the standard method plt.hist(l) ?

I want to be able to see all entries in the list and their relative frequencies.

Doing:

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt 
l = [0, -1, -1, -1, -10, -100]
plt.hist(l)
plt.show()

Results in:

What would be the correct way to set the number of the bins in the current case?

Any help highly apprecited

Banghua Zhao · Accepted Answer · 2018-11-30 23:56:41Z

1

Suppose all the entries in your list l are integers. You can use bins to control the number or size of bins in your histogram.

from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
l = [0, -1, -1, -1, -10, -100]
plt.hist(l, bins=max(l)-min(l)+1)
ax = plt.subplot()
ax.set_xticks(l)
plt.show()

answered Nov 30, 2018 at 21:00

Banghua Zhao

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2 Comments

Thank you. Could you specify how to have all the entries values plotted on the x-axis? Instead of -100, -80, -60, -40, -20, 0 only

@Employee You can use set_xticks() to specify the values on x-axis tick. I have changed the plot.