Why histograms show distributions in Matplotlib - See It in Action

Why Histograms Show Distributions

📖 Scenario: Imagine you work at a bakery and want to understand how many cookies customers buy each day. You have a list of cookie counts sold daily for a week. You want to see how these sales numbers are spread out.

🎯 Goal: You will create a histogram using matplotlib to visualize the distribution of cookie sales over a week. This will help you see which sales counts happen most often.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a list called cookie_sales with exact daily sales numbers

Create a variable called bins to set the number of histogram bins

Use matplotlib.pyplot.hist() with cookie_sales and bins

Display the histogram with plt.show()

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Histograms help businesses understand patterns in their data, like how often certain sales amounts happen, which can guide decisions.

💼 Career

Data scientists and analysts use histograms to quickly see data distributions and spot trends or outliers.

1

Create the cookie sales data

Create a list called cookie_sales with these exact values: [5, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9, 7] representing cookies sold each day.

Matplotlib

# Create the cookie_sales list with daily sales numbers
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use square brackets to create a list with the exact numbers given.

2

Set the number of bins for the histogram

Create a variable called bins and set it to 4 to divide the sales data into 4 groups.

Matplotlib

cookie_sales = [5, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9, 7]
# Create the bins variable and set it to 4
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 4 to the variable bins.

3

Create the histogram using matplotlib

Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt. Then use plt.hist() with cookie_sales and bins to create the histogram.

Matplotlib

cookie_sales = [5, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9, 7]
bins = 4
# Import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# Create the histogram with plt.hist(cookie_sales, bins=bins)
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use import matplotlib.pyplot as plt and then plt.hist() with the right arguments.

4

Display the histogram

Use plt.show() to display the histogram plot.

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

cookie_sales = [5, 7, 8, 5, 6, 9, 7]
bins = 4

plt.hist(cookie_sales, bins=bins)
# Display the histogram plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Call plt.show() to see the histogram window.