MATLAB Functions

Histogram plot

hist(Y)
hist(Y,x)
hist(Y,nbins)
[n,xout] = hist(...)

Description

A histogram shows the distribution of data values.

hist(Y)

draws a histogram of the elements in Y. hist distributes the bins along the x-axis between the minimum and maximum values of Y.

hist(Y,x)

draws a histogram using n bins, where n is length(x). x also specifies the locations on the x-axis where hist places the bins. For example, if x is a 5-element vector, hist distributes the elements of Y into five bins centered on the x-axis at the elements in x.

hist(Y,nbins)

draws a histogram with no more bins than nbins.

[n,xout] = hist(...)

returns vectors n and xout containing the frequency counts and the bin locations. This syntax does not generate a plot. This is useful when you need more control over the appearance of a graph, for example, to combine a histogram into a more elaborate plot. You can use bar(xout,n) to plot the histogram.

Remarks

All elements in vector Y or in one column of matrix Y are grouped according to their numeric range. Each group is shown as one bin.

The histogram's x-axis reflects the range of values in Y. The histogram's y-axis shows the number of elements that fall within the groups; therefore, the y-axis ranges from 0 to the greatest number of elements deposited in any bin.

Examples

Generate a bell-curve histogram from Gaussian data.

x = -2.9:0.1:2.9;
y = randn(10000,1);
hist(y,x)