Python Business Intelligence Cookbook

Plotting a cumulative distribution function

Another interesting plot that we can create is one showing cumulative distribution. This plot shows the probability of finding a number in a bin or any lower bin. We do this by adding a single argument to the hist() function.

How to do it…

1. To create a cumulative distribution plot for a single column in a Pandas DataFrame, begin by importing all the required libraries. To show the matplotlib plots in IPython Notebook, we will use an IPython magic function which starts with %:

   %matplotlib inline
   import pandas as pd
   import numpy as np
   from pymongo import MongoClient
   import matplotlib as mpl
   import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

2. Next, connect to MongoDB and run a query specifying the five fields to be retrieved from ...