How to Plot a Horizontal Histogram in MATLAB?

Question

I looked and couldn't find an answer for this question, so here goes.

I have some data (a 1 X 1000 vector called data) that I would like to plot the histogram information for. If I use the histogram(data) command then I get a nice enough histogram plot where the x-axis is the divided evenly into ten buckets (midpoint values of the ten equal intervals between the max and min values of the data) and the y-axis records how many occurances occured for each bucket.

What I really want is the same plot, just with the y-axis representing the bucket intervals, and the x-axis representing the count for each bucket...

That way I can stick it into a subplot next to some other information, and everything will be easier to understand (and look super cool). What's an easy way to accomplish this? Thanks!

Answer 1

You can achieve what you want using the barh function. Here's an example:

testData = randn(10000,1); %# test data
[counts,bins] = hist(testData); %# get counts and bin locations
barh(bins,counts)

Flipping the bar chart

Here's an example showing how to flip the chart along a vertical axis.

h=barh(bins,counts); %# include previous two lines from above
set(get(h,'Parent'),'xdir','r')

Answer 2

since the HISTOGRAM function was introduced (R2014b), you can make a horizontal histogram by setting 'orientation' to 'horizontal'

example:

histogram(data,'orientation','horizontal')