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Re: patch proposal for hist


From: Julien Bect
Subject: Re: patch proposal for hist
Date: Thu, 22 Oct 2015 15:23:50 +0200
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux i686; rv:31.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/31.8.0

Le 22/10/2015 10:37, Lars Winterfeld a écrit :
I want to propose a patch that changes the default number of bins of the hist()
function.

Currently, the default choice is 10. This respects neither the number of data
points nor estimated properties of the distribution. Here, I propose the follow
Freedman-Diaconis' choice, see
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram#Number_of_bins_and_width . How to
calculate the "perfect number of bins" is matter of taste and depends on the
unknown distribution. Still, Freedman-Diaconis is a fairly good choice for
reasons explained in the above Wikipedia article. In any case, it is better than
"10".

Hello Lars,

Unfortunately, the default "10" must be preserved for compatibility with the hist function in Matlab.

http://fr.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/hist.html

Anyway, note that it is now recommended in Matlab's documentation to use the new function "histogram" (introduced in R2014b) instead of "hist".

This new function has a "BinMethod" option, which can be set to "fd" for Freedman-Diaconis.

http://fr.mathworks.com/help/matlab/ref/histogram.html?searchHighlight=FreedmanDiaconis

Others will correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think there is a corresponding "histogram" function in Octave yet.

This would be a welcome contribution for sure ;-)

@++
Julien




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