related plot type is density plotwhich is formed by computing an estimate of continuous probability distribution that might have generated the observed data usual procedure is to approximate this distribution as mixture of kernelsthat issimpler distributions like the normal (gaussiandistribution thusdensity plots are also known as kde (kernel density estimateplots using plot with kind='kdemakes density plot using the standard mixture-of-normals kde (see figure - )in [ ]tips['tip_pct'plot(kind='kde'these two plot types are often plotted togetherthe histogram in normalized form (to give binned densitywith kernel density estimate plotted on top as an exampleconsider bimodal distribution consisting of draws from two different standard normal distributions (see figure - )in [ ]comp np random normal( size= ( in [ ]comp np random normal( size= ( in [ ]values series(np concatenate([comp comp ])in [ ]values hist(bins= alpha= color=' 'normed=trueout[ ]in [ ]values plot(kind='kde'style=' --'scatter plots scatter plots are useful way of examining the relationship between two one-dimensional data series matplotlib has scatter plotting method that is the workhorse of plotting functions in pandas www it-ebooks info