Doug's MATLAB Video Tutorials

June 12th, 2009

Using HIST and BAR to customize your histograms

 I recently had a question come in via e-mail where this MATLAB user wanted to be able to change the look of her histogram. The key to this problem was using HIST to generate the binning data and then use the more flexible BAR to make the bar chart look exactly as she wished. If HIST is used without a left hand side argument, then the function will make a plot using some default choices. If you want more control over the graph, you will have to use the flexibility of BAR to do that.

By Doug Hull

17:39 UTC | Posted in Format: Video, Level: Basic | Permalink | 12 Comments »

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12 Responses to “Using HIST and BAR to customize your histograms”

  1. Marco replied on June 2nd, 2010 at 19:52 UTC :

    Hi doug,
    can I ask you a question about the histogram of an image?
    Here the simple code:

    N=200;
    A=randn(N,N);
    imshow(A), figure, imhist(A), axis tight

    The histogram does not look right. I am expecting a Gaussian looking centered at zero…
    thanks a lot,
    Marco

  2. Steve Eddins replied on June 3rd, 2010 at 16:26 UTC :

    Marco—imhist assumes a dynamic range of [0,1] when you pass it a floating-point image, so it uses bins in that range.

  3. Shalini replied on June 7th, 2010 at 04:08 UTC :

    Can I have some tips on how to write a MATLAB code to plot a histogram without using the function “hist”

    Thanks,
    Shalini

  4. dhull replied on June 7th, 2010 at 15:12 UTC :

    @Shalini,

    Why would you want to?

    You can use the output from hist as input to BAR.m if you want finer control.

  5. Shalini replied on June 8th, 2010 at 02:29 UTC :

    I’m supposed to write a code for a histogram without using the hist function

  6. dhull replied on June 8th, 2010 at 13:42 UTC :

    @shalini

    >>edit hist

    Take a look at how it was implemented.

  7. Chitra replied on August 3rd, 2010 at 17:54 UTC :

    Is it possible to put error bars for a histogram. the error bar will be the standard deviation of the values used to plot the histogram.

    Chitra

  8. dhull replied on August 3rd, 2010 at 17:56 UTC :

    Never tried this, but it might work:

    http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/25613-barrerror-utility-for-bar-plots-with-automatic-error-bars

  9. maria replied on November 4th, 2010 at 16:30 UTC :

    Hi Doug,
    i want to ask you a question.
    I want a function which creates a histogram where the x axis will consist words and y axis numbers. For example, i have the names {‘Paul’ ‘Kate’ ‘John’ ‘Alex’} and their ages {23 40 16 32} in a cell array 4×2. I want the names at x axis and ages at y axis.
    Is there any function to do this?

    Thanks a lot..

  10. dhull replied on November 4th, 2010 at 16:54 UTC :

    @maria,

    You can change the ‘yTickLabel’ property of the axes with set.

    Doug

  11. winnie replied on July 9th, 2011 at 14:18 UTC :

    Hi Doug
    i would like to use hist command to help to plot a frequency table with class size of 5, is it possible?
    eg:
    input=1 2 3 7 8 9
    table=
    [ 1-5 3 ;
    6-10 3 ]

    thx a lot =)

  12. dhull replied on July 11th, 2011 at 15:47 UTC :

    @Winnie,
    You will want to choose the bins specifically as shown in the documentation for HIST.

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