Plotting binned data with uneven bins

Question

I have a data set that I've managed to bin into intervals of 250 and I'm having a very difficult time plotting the values properly. I've had a look at

python plot simple histogram given binned data

How to make a histogram from a list of data

but in my case all I get is a single vertical line.

for reference my binned data looks like:

(0, 250]                2
(250, 500]              1
(500, 750]              5
(750, 1000]            13
(1000, 1250]           77
(1250, 1500]          601
(1500, 1750]         1348
(1750, 2000]         3262
(2000, 2250]         3008
(2250, 2500]         5118
(2500, 2750]         4576
(2750, 3000]         5143
(3000, 3250]         3509
(3250, 3500]         4390
(3500, 3750]         2749
(3750, 4000]         2794
(4000, 4250]         1391
(4250, 4500]         1753
(4500, 4750]         1099
(4750, 5000]         1592
(5000, 5250]          688
(5250, 5500]          993
(5500, 5750]          540
(5750, 6000]          937
(6000, 6250]          405
(6250, 6500]          572
(6500, 6750]          202
(6750, 7000]          369
(7000, 7250]          164
(7250, 7500]          231
                     ... 
(7750, 8000]          285
(8000, 8250]           55
(8250, 8500]          116
(8500, 8750]           29
(8750, 9000]          140
(9000, 9250]           31
(9250, 9500]           68
(9500, 9750]           20
(9750, 10000]         132
(10000, 10250]         15
(10250, 10500]         29
(10500, 10750]         21
(10750, 11000]         73
(11000, 11250]         26
(11250, 11500]         36
(11500, 11750]         21
(11750, 12000]         74
(12000, 12250]          5
(12250, 12500]         50
(12500, 12750]         13
(12750, 13000]         34
(13000, 13250]          4
(13250, 13500]         45
(13500, 13750]         14
(13750, 14000]         53
(14000, 14250]          6
(14250, 14500]         17
(14500, 14750]          7
(14750, 15000]         79
(15000, 10000000]     256

where the last interval encompasses everything greater then 15,000. I've put the above values in a list then attempted to plot:

bins = [i for i in range(0, 15001, 250)]
bins.append(10000000)
categories = pd.cut(data["price"], bins)
price_binned = list(pd.value_counts(categories).reindex(categories.cat.categories))
plt.hist(price_binned)

which produces a histogram with 12 bins. adding the bin argument

plt.hist(price_binned, bins=(bin_num+1)) 

produces a histogram where I get a very high vertical line on the left. Finally, I was considering adding plt.xticks(bins), but then I get a graph that produces nothing.

Is there anyway that I could produce a histogram where the x-axis are the bin values and the y-axis are the values in the bins?

using plt.bar()

using plt.hist() with no bin argument

using plt.hist() with bin=bins

using seaborn

Answer 1

The main problem you have seems to be that you are asking plt.hist() and sns.distplot() to create histograms of your pre-binned histogram data.

You can use a bar chart to facilitate your custom binning scheme with the price_binned variable as follows:

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1, 1)
ax.bar(range(len(bins)), price_binned, width=1, align='center')
ax.set_xticklabels([x + 125 for x in bins[:-1]])
plt.show()

Where I have used the midpoint value as the label for each bin. This can be swapped for any other xtick label notation you prefer.

Here is the result I get using (most) of your data (some is missing): result.