Logarithmic multi-sequenz plot with equal bar widths

Question

I have something like

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

a=[0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 1, 2, 3]
plt.hist((a*2, a*3), bins=[0, 0.1, 1, 10])
plt.gca().set_xscale("symlog", linthreshx=0.1)
plt.show()

which gives me the following plot:

As one can see, the bar width is not equal. In the linear part (from 0 to 0.1), everything is find, but after this, the bar width is still in linear scale, while the axis is in logarithmic scale, giving me uneven widths for bars and spaces in between (the tick is not in the middle of the bars).

Is there any way to correct this?

Answer 1

Inspired by https://stackoverflow.com/a/30555229/635387 I came up with the following solution:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

d=[0.05, 0.1, 0.2, 1, 2, 3]


def LogHistPlot(data, bins):
    totalWidth=0.8
    colors=("b", "r", "g")
    for i, d in enumerate(data):
        heights = np.histogram(d, bins)[0]
        width=1/len(data)*totalWidth
        left=np.array(range(len(heights))) + i*width

        plt.bar(left, heights, width, color=colors[i], label=i)
        plt.xticks(range(len(bins)), bins)
    plt.legend(loc='best')

LogHistPlot((d*2, d*3, d*4), [0, 0.1, 1, 10])

plt.show()

Which produces this plot:

The basic idea is to drop the plt.hist function, compute the histogram by numpy and plot it with plt.bar. Than, you can easily use a linear x-axis, which makes the bar width calculation trivial. Lastly, the ticks are replaced by the bin edges, resulting in the logarithmic scale. And you don't even have to deal with the symlog linear/logarithmic botchery anymore.