Histograms post

_posts/2022-08-24-histogramming-with-dask.md

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+---
+layout: post
+title: Histogramming with Dask
+author: <a href="https://ddavis.io/">Doug Davis</a> (Anaconda)
+tags: [histogram, array, dask]
+theme: twitter
+---
+
+{% include JB/setup %}
+
+## Primer on Histogramming in Python
+
+[Histograms][wiki] are a core data type for many uses of statistics.
+Countless scientific computing libraries provide an interface for
+binning data ("histogramming") in any number of dimensions. Python has
+an embarrassment of riches with regards to histogramming, and we won't
+go into all existing libraries. In the author's opinion, the best
+avenues for histogramming in Python (as of August 2022) are NumPy and
+[boost-histogram][bh]. NumPy provides a number of functions associated
+with binning data; the main three are [`histogram`][nphist],
+[`histogram2d`][nphist2d], and [`histogramdd`][nphistdd].
+Boost-histogram provides an object oriented API for binning data, with
+multiple types of [axes][bhaxes], [storages][bhstorage], and
+[accumulators][bhaccum]. For simple cases NumPy is great and gets the
+job done, but boost-histogram provides a much more feature-rich
+library and it is also [more performant][perf].
+
+## Enter Dask
+
+Since `dask.array` implements a subset of the NumPy interface, it's
+natural for `dask.array` to implement the functions that exist in
+`NumPy`. That's exactly what we do!
+
+The [dask-histogram][dh] project...
+
+[bh]: https://boost-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
+[wiki]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Histogram
+[nphist]: https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.histogram.html
+[nphistdd]: https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.histogramdd.html
+[nphist2d]: https://numpy.org/doc/stable/reference/generated/numpy.histogram2d.html
+[bhaxes]: https://boost-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-guide/axes.html
+[bhaccum]: https://boost-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-guide/accumulators.html
+[bhstorage]: https://boost-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-guide/storage.html
+[perf]: https://boost-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/latest/notebooks/PerformanceComparison.html
+[dh]: https://dask-histogram.readthedocs.io/en/stable/