Question

Working on PS 12 and everything is going fine, but I can't find a way to make my histograms for problem 5&6 look nice. I want the histograms from the different delays to be scaled in the same way so that they are easily comparable. Any suggestions on how this could be accomplished? Thanks!

Answer 1

use the normed = True argument?
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/pyplot_api.html#matplotlib.pyplot.hist

Answer 2

Normed just adjusts the histograms y axis so that it shows probability rather than number, which is fine, but not the problem I'm encountering. The problem is that with a longer delay, often the virus population never ends in remission so the x-axis autoscale just shows stuff around 1000. I'd like all of the graphs to have the same x-axis, essentially.
I've tried using: pylab.xticks(range(0,1200,50),range(0,1200,50)) and/or pylab.xlim(0,1200) which gives basically the effect I want except that for some reason final populations of 0 don't show up on the histogram (it looks like they're just smushed on the edge-picture attached)

Answer 3

start the x-axis at -1?
I've always just used matplotlib, not pylab - does pylab set/get axes parameters?. maybe the pyplot.axis() scaled argument or x/y min/max arguments would work
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/pyplot_api.html?highlight=xmin#matplotlib.pyplot.axis
set them dynamically based on the data?
or set_xlim
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/api/axes_api.html?highlight=set_xlim#matplotlib.axes.Axes.set_xlim
http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/examples/api/histogram_demo.html?highlight=hist

i haven't used it for a while but when i started trying to fine tune and make plots dynamic, it seemed easier working directly with the 'artists' - but then i never tried using pylab, which is supposed to make things easier

Answer 4

Solved it!

Switching to matplotlib doesn't appear to make any difference. adjusting to xlim(-50,1200) still displayed the 0s as a single line. It looks like the issue is that all of the items have the same value so the bar is super thin. I provided a list for bins so that it clumps them in 50s and it made the bar thick.
Thanks for your help