21. Histograms

This chapter describes functions for creating histograms. Histograms provide a convenient way of summarizing the distribution of a set of data. A histogram consists of a set of bins which count the number of events falling into a given range of a continuous variable x. In GSL the bins of a histogram contain floating-point numbers, so they can be used to record both integer and non-integer distributions. The bins can use arbitrary sets of ranges (uniformly spaced bins are the default). Both one and two-dimensional histograms are supported.

Once a histogram has been created it can also be converted into a probability distribution function. The library provides efficient routines for selecting random samples from probability distributions. This can be useful for generating simulations based on real data.

The functions are declared in the header files ‘gsl_histogram.h’ and ‘gsl_histogram2d.h’.