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Asked 7 years, 2 months ago Active 14 days ago Viewed 23k times
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Users I made a histogram of the 'cdf' (cumulative distribution) of a function. The

histogram is basically No. of counts vs. luminosity. Now, how do I extract
FIND A JOB 11 data points from a histogram? I need actual values of Luminosities. I am
Jobs using Matplotlib in Python, and any online book, example, tutorial etc is not
helping.
Companies

2 l= [ss.gammainccinv(aa+1, u[i]) for i in a] #is the cdf function

TEAMS What’s this?
plt.hist(l, 50, histtype= 'step', align='mid') #is the histogram
Free 30 Day Trial plt.show()

I am not sure if I should align the bins to the edges or the mid point, but all
I need is a list of l's.

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated!

python matplotlib histogram

Share Edit Follow asked Nov 21 '13 at 18:19

user3014593
131 1 1 5

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2 Answers Active Oldest Votes

You've already got a list of l s, so I'm not sure what you mean by that last
statement, so maybe I've misinterpreted the question.
15
To get the values from a histogram, plt.hist returns them, so all you
have to do is save them.

If you don't save them, the interpreter just prints the output:

In [34]: x = np.random.rand(100)

In [35]: plt.hist(x)
Out[35]:
(array([ 11., 9., 10., 6., 8., 8., 10., 10., 11., 17.]
array([ 0.00158591, 0.100731 , 0.19987608, 0.29902116, 0.3981
0.49731133, 0.59645641, 0.69560149, 0.79474657, 0.89389
0.99303674]),
<a list of 10 Patch objects>)

So, to save them, do:

counts, bins, bars = plt.hist(x)

Share Edit Follow answered Nov 21 '13 at 19:30

askewchan
38.6k 13 103 127

yes, all I needed to do was "print l" instead of "print l[i]". That only gave the
first number from the array. Or a number. Learning from the silly mistakes.
Thank you! :) – user3014593 Nov 27 '13 at 16:04

add a comment

You can also retrieve info from an already plotted histogram. For example:

2 x = np.random.rand(100)
plt.hist(x)

ax = plt.gca() # get axis handle

You can access to each individual bar using patches . Then .get_xy()
will give you the x-y coordiate of a single bar (lower left corner),
.get_width() will give width of the bar, and .get_height() will give the
height of the bar (which is probably what you want).

p = ax.patches # There are 10 patches

p[0].get_xy()
>> (0.011714084185001972, 0.0)
p[0].get_width()
>> 0.09871329223828645
p[0].get_height()
>> 8.0

So to retrieve all the heights:

heights = [patch.get_height() for patch in p]

And to reproduce the histogram:

plt.bar(range(len(heights)), heights)

Share Edit Follow answered Jan 15 at 16:25

Sinan Gok
131 4

add a comment

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