How to have logarithmic bins in a Python histogram

As far as I know the option Log=True in the histogram function only refers to the y-axis.

P.hist(d,bins=50,log=True,alpha=0.5,color='b',histtype='step')

I need the bins to be equally spaced in log10. Is there something that can do this?

Solution 1:

use logspace() to create a geometric sequence, and pass it to bins parameter. And set the scale of xaxis to log scale.

import pylab as pl
import numpy as np

data = np.random.normal(size=10000)
pl.hist(data, bins=np.logspace(np.log10(0.1),np.log10(1.0), 50))
pl.gca().set_xscale("log")
pl.show()

Solution 2:

The most direct way is to just compute the log10 of the limits, compute linearly spaced bins, and then convert back by raising to the power of 10, as below:

import pylab as pl
import numpy as np

data = np.random.normal(size=10000)

MIN, MAX = .01, 10.0

pl.figure()
pl.hist(data, bins = 10 ** np.linspace(np.log10(MIN), np.log10(MAX), 50))
pl.gca().set_xscale("log")
pl.show()