How to define the bin size for a histogram

Hello

I have 2 questions.

I am trying to create 100 bins for my histograms which covers actually 10000 data points. The command bincounts = histc(x,binranges), allows me to put the binranges value but I dont want to repeat (0 100 200..........10000)as the value for 'binranges'. So is there any shorter way to give that kind of argument for binranges to use that command. Once I know that, I can use bar(binranges,bincounts,'histc') to plot the histogram.

Second question, how do I normalize the area of the histogram to be 1.

Thanks

Answer 1

[Guillaume]

There are two histogram functions in matlab. The other one, hist allows you to specify the number of bins instead of the edges.

As for normalising:

dist = hist(data, 100);
dist = dist / sum(dist);

[upinderjeet]

That was very helpful.

Thanks

[upinderjeet]

So for plotting, do I just do plot(dist) ???

[Guillaume]

Yes, or you could:

[dist, centers] = hist(data, 100);
dist = dist /sum(dist);
bar(centers, dist); %or plot
xlim([min(centers) max(centers)]);

[upinderjeet]

Thanks

[upinderjeet]

Hi, one more question:

I am using the following code:

X=rand(10000,1);

[N,centers] = hist(X, 100);

N = N / sum(N); figure(1)

bar(centers, N); %or plot

xlim([min(centers) max(centers)]);ylim([0 1]);

Y=pdf('uniform',X,0,1);

figure(2)

plot(Y)

I am not getting the normalized area of 1. The method you told me gives me normalized x axis of the plot but I want the total area to be 1 as well. Like, If i am able to expand the histogram plot vertically(multiply by 100), I would get area of 1. But not really sure how to achieve this. Please run my code to see my problem