Let’s say you have a nice histogram, like this…
…and you want to fit a gaussian to it so that you can find the mean, and the standard deviation. Follow these steps!
First, we have to make sure we have the right modules imported
>>> import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
>>> import matplotlib.mlab as mlab
>>> from scipy.stats import norm
Let’s say your data is stored in some array called data.
>>> (mu,sigma) = norm.fit(data)
Mu is the mean, and sigma is one standard deviation. If you don’t care about plotting your data, you can stop here.
>>> plt.figure(1)
>>> n,bins,patches=plt.hist(data,20,normed=1,facecolor=’green’,align=’mid’)
The number after data (20) is the number of bins you want your data to go into. Normed has to do with the integral of the gaussian.
>>> y = mlab.normpdf(bins,mu,sigma)
>>> plt.plot(bins,y,’r–‘,linewidth=2)
Now your data is nicely plotted as a histogram and its corresponding gaussian!
but how to deal with errors in data?
For our purposes, we are using the standard deviation as the uncertainty.
In what format would the ‘data’ array be? A list of the x values, or a list of the y values? Or both?
can u explain the line “>>> plt.figure(1)” and “>>> plt.plot(bins,y,’r–‘,linewidth=2)”