How to plot a histogram?

How do I plot a histogram of data which is very large in GNUPlot / Octave or any other scientific tool?

• I have a dataset of float values that I want to analyze. It has around 92 million data points, 24 million of them unique and range from 1e-13 to 0.1. To get an idea of how they are distributed, I sorted them and ran uniq -c to get the unique values preceded by their counts. It would be nice if I could get a histogram of these values where the application decides what the appropriate binning is. As a preliminary attempt, I simply tried plotting the values on the X axis with their counts on the Y axis but GNUPlot fails with the error "out of memory for expanding curve points". Is there a way I could see a histogram?

• Answer:

  I don't know about gnuplot, but I looked up your problem and found this page: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/7348/more-efficient-plot-functions-in-r-when-millions-of-points-are-present From which there is this: Look at the http://cran.r-project.org/package=hexbin package which implements paper/method by Dan Carr. The http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/hexbin/vignettes/hexagon_binning.pdf has more details which I quote below: 1 Overview Hexagon binning is a form of bivariate histogram useful for visualizing the struc- ture in datasets with large n. The underlying concept of hexagon binning is extremely simple; the xy plane over the set (range(x), range(y)) is tessellated by a regular grid of hexagons. the number of points falling in each hexagon are counted and stored in a data structure the hexagons with count > 0 are plotted using a color ramp or varying the radius of the hexagon in proportion to the counts. The underlying algorithm is extremely fast and effective for displaying the structure of datasets with n≥10^6 If the size of the grid and the cuts in the color ramp are chosen in a clever fashion than the structure inherent in the data should emerge in the binned plots. The same caveats apply to hexagon binning as apply to histograms and care should be exercised in choosing the binning parameters. http://stats.stackexchange.com/a/7356http://stats.stackexchange.com/posts/7356/edit answered Feb 18 '11 at 2:02 http://stats.stackexchange.com/users/334/dirk-eddelbuettel http://stats.stackexchange.com/users/334/dirk-eddelbuettel Check out the link. There are other solutions there, as well. Let me know if any are useful.