How to fit an uniform distribution to a histogram?

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I have a set of data that is generated from an uniform distribution. Now I want to fit the corresponding histogram to an uniform distribution, such that there is a 'ㄇ' shape of line plotted on that histogram. I tried to fit it by using the MATLAB built-in function histfit, but there is no such an option of uniform distribution for histfit... As a workaround, I would like to do it manually but I have no ideas. How can I do it?
data = unifrnd(-100,100,1000,1);
%% MATLAB built-in function: 'histfit'
figure(1);
hh = histfit(data); % No options for 'histfit' to fit data to an uniform distribution
%% Manually fitting a histogram to an uniform distribution
figure(2);
numBars = length(hh(1).XData);
histogram(data, numBars);
% TODO: How to do next to plot a line that fits the data to an uniform distribution?
  4 Comments
Torsten
Torsten on 13 Jan 2022
Edited: Torsten on 13 Jan 2022
They are not free, they are known.

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Accepted Answer

John D'Errico
John D'Errico on 13 Jan 2022
If you have histfit, then you would also have unifit.
data = unifrnd(-100,100,1000,1);
[AHAT,BHAT,ACI,BCI] = unifit(data)
AHAT = -99.8483
BHAT = 99.9082
ACI = 2×1
-100.4476 -99.8483
BCI = 2×1
99.9082 100.5076
histogram(data,'norm','pdf')
hold on
fplot(@(x) unifpdf(x,AHAT,BHAT))

More Answers (2)

Jeff Miller
Jeff Miller on 12 Jan 2022
histogram(data, numBars);
avgHeight = numel(data)/numBars;
hold on;
plot([min(data), max(data)],[avgHeight, avgHeight])
  4 Comments
Image Analyst
Image Analyst on 14 Jan 2022
Yes, the blue bars are from a limited number of points drawn from a random, uniform distribution, and the thin orange line in John's plot is the height the bars would be at if the sample distribution was perfectly flat, like if you had no randomness and an infinite number of points.
Jeff Miller
Jeff Miller on 15 Jan 2022
Apparently the OP wanted the histogram's y-axis scaled in terms of in terms of probability density, as in John's answer, rather than in terms of counts, as in the original posted figure.

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Walter Roberson
Walter Roberson on 12 Jan 2022
Calculate the 98th prctile of the counts; that corresponds to 2 standard deviations. Min and max of the x gives you the other bounds. You might also want to mark the mean of the counts.
If you record the handle returned by histogram() then the counts is the BinCounts property of the handle.

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