Fit a gaussian function

Take a look at this answer for fitting arbitrary curves to data. Basically you can use scipy.optimize.curve_fit to fit any function you want to your data. The code below shows how you can fit a Gaussian to some random data (credit to this SciPy-User mailing list post).

import numpy
from scipy.optimize import curve_fit
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Define some test data which is close to Gaussian
data = numpy.random.normal(size=10000)

hist, bin_edges = numpy.histogram(data, density=True)
bin_centres = (bin_edges[:-1] + bin_edges[1:])/2

# Define model function to be used to fit to the data above:
def gauss(x, *p):
    A, mu, sigma = p
    return A*numpy.exp(-(x-mu)**2/(2.*sigma**2))

# p0 is the initial guess for the fitting coefficients (A, mu and sigma above)
p0 = [1., 0., 1.]

coeff, var_matrix = curve_fit(gauss, bin_centres, hist, p0=p0)

# Get the fitted curve
hist_fit = gauss(bin_centres, *coeff)

plt.plot(bin_centres, hist, label='Test data')
plt.plot(bin_centres, hist_fit, label='Fitted data')

# Finally, lets get the fitting parameters, i.e. the mean and standard deviation:
print 'Fitted mean = ', coeff[1]
print 'Fitted standard deviation = ', coeff[2]

plt.show()

You can try sklearn gaussian mixture model estimation as below :

import numpy as np
import sklearn.mixture

gmm = sklearn.mixture.GMM()

# sample data
a = np.random.randn(1000)

# result
r = gmm.fit(a[:, np.newaxis]) # GMM requires 2D data as of sklearn version 0.16
print("mean : %f, var : %f" % (r.means_[0, 0], r.covars_[0, 0]))

Reference : http://scikit-learn.org/stable/modules/mixture.html#mixture

Note that in this way, you don't need to estimate your sample distribution with an histogram.

Kind of an old question, but for anybody looking just to plot a density fit for a series, you could try matplotlib's .plot(kind='kde'). Docs here.

Example with pandas:

mydf.x.plot(kind='kde')

I am not sure what your input is, but possibly your y-axis scale is too large (20000), try reducing this number. The following code works for me:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

#created my variable
v = np.random.normal(0,1,1000)


fig, ax = plt.subplots()


plt.hist(v, bins=500, normed=1, color='#7F38EC', histtype='step')

#plot
plt.title("Gaussian")
plt.axis([-1, 2, 0, 1]) #changed 20000 to 1

plt.show()

Edit:

If you want the actual count of values on y-axis, you can set normed=0. And would just get rid of the plt.axis([-1, 2, 0, 1]).

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

#function
v = np.random.normal(0,1,500000)


fig, ax = plt.subplots()

# changed normed=1 to normed=0
plt.hist(v, bins=500, normed=0, color='#7F38EC', histtype='step')

#plot
plt.title("Gaussian")
#plt.axis([-1, 2, 0, 20000]) 

plt.show()