Generating histograms and box plots

Matplotlib supports the creation of a variety of displays of data. In this recipe, we will demonstrate how to use two popular graphs representing data variability: histograms and box plots (also known as box-and-whisker plots). We will present a comparison between the distribution of heights in the male and female populations. To make the example self-contained, instead of using real data, we will simulate a population with the known distribution of heights for males and females.

Getting ready

Start Jupyter and run the following three commands in an execution cell:

%matplotlib inline
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

How to do it…

Run the following code in a Jupyter code cell:

from scipy.stats import norm
mmean, msdev = 70, 4.0
fmean, fsdev = 65, 3.5
mdist = norm(mmean, scale=msdev)
fdist = norm(fmean, scale=fsdev)
nm, nf = 2000, 1500
mdata = mdist.rvs(size=nm)
fdata = fdist.rvs(size=nf)
plt.figure(figsize=(12, 4))
plt.subplot(1,2,1)
plt.hist...