ENH: Add Series.histogram()

[danielballan]

Should I write a Series.histogram that calls numpy.histogram and returns a new Series of counts indexed by bins?

In [4]: s = Series(randn(100))

In [5]: counts, bins = np.histogram(s)

In [6]: Series(counts, index=bins[:-1])
Out[6]: 
-2.968575     1
-2.355032     4
-1.741488     5
-1.127944    26
-0.514401    23
 0.099143    23
 0.712686    12
 1.326230     5
 1.939773     0
 2.553317     1
dtype: int32

...would be accomplished by...

Series.histogram()

which would accept at the arguments that np.histogram accepts (e.g., choosing bins manually, specifying number or range of bins, etc.).

from http://stackoverflow.com/a/17150734/1221924

The proposed method doesn't save all that much typing, but it would help users discover this convenient way of storing a histogram. Proceed?

[jreback]

What you are proposing is basically this
(I am not sure what is a better result in any event)

In [9]: s.groupby(pd.cut(s,10)).count()
Out[9]: 
(-2.955, -2.419]     1
(-2.419, -1.889]     2
(-1.889, -1.359]     2
(-1.359, -0.829]     8
(-0.829, -0.299]    24
(-0.299, 0.231]     21
(0.231, 0.761]      15
(0.761, 1.291]      14
(1.291, 1.821]      10
(1.821, 2.351]       3
dtype: int64

[danielballan]

That's new to me. Not sure which output is more valuable for whatever users would do next.

[jreback]

yours more friendly for plotting
cut is NaN friendly (not sure if np.histogram is)

[jtratner]

@jreback cut returns string row labels, right?

[jreback]

it returns a Categorical which has both labels and levels

[cpcloud]

would this be more useful as a top level function instead of a method?

np.histogram is not nan friendly

[jreback]

I think an instance method on series is about right (but maybe using groupy and cut as above)

[danielballan]

I don't have strong feelings about this. It's certainly easy to work around, but I really hate working with Categoricals.

[jreback]

problem is np.histogram doesn't like nan
maybe just drop em anyhow

[cpcloud]

or u can just get the bins from cut

cat, bins = cut(s, 10, retbins=True)
s = Series(cat.values, index=bins[:-1], name=cat.name)

not sure if name should be there...

[hayd]

confusing having different hist and histogram methods... perhaps this could be an argument (bins) to value_counts ?

[danielballan]

Good idea.
On Aug 6, 2013 6:52 PM, "Andy Hayden" notifications@github.com wrote:

confusing having different hist and histogram methods... perhaps this
could be an argument (bins) to value_counts ?

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Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHubhttps://github.com//issues/3945#issuecomment-22217991
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[hayd]

This is pretty easy, pr on the way, will also add more functionality to Series.value_counts which was never updated from pd.value_counts.