Is there a clean way to generate a line histogram chart in Python?

Question

I need to create a histogram that plots a line and not a step or bar chart. I am using python 2.7 The plt.hist function below plots a stepped line and the bins don't line up in the plt.plot function.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np noise = np.random.normal(0,1,(1000,1)) (n,x,_) = plt.hist(noise, bins = np.linspace(-3,3,7), histtype=u'step' )   plt.plot(x[:-1],n) 

I need the line to correlate with each bin's count at the bin centers as if there was a histtype=u'line' flag to go with the align=u'mid' flag

Answer 1

Using scipy, you could use stats.gaussian_kde to estimate the probability density function:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt import numpy as np import scipy.stats as stats  noise = np.random.normal(0, 1, (1000, )) density = stats.gaussian_kde(noise) n, x, _ = plt.hist(noise, bins=np.linspace(-3, 3, 50),                     histtype=u'step', density=True)   plt.plot(x, density(x)) plt.show()