Histogram vs Signal from Condition: Displaying Histogram Bars in Chronological Order by Month

[Emilio Conde]

There are times when we'd like to view histograms in a monthly view ordered chronologically by the starting month in the display range. This post reviews the results of 3 different methods of utilizing Histogram vs Signal from Condition. All 3 examples show the same results but differ in how the results are displayed.

 

 

Example 1: 

This method displays histograms by order of Month, thus, January will show first with December showing last, even though the display range is set from 7/26/2017 - 7/26/2018. As a result, we are not always looking at data in chronological order with this method.

Simply goto your Histogram tool, select your signal/condition & statistic, then select Time as aggregation type --> Month of Year. Continue to Execute.

 

Example 2:

This method will ensure your Histogram is in chronological order, first ordered by year, then by month. The caveat to this is the spacing of all bars in the display window is not held constant (a gap between years will be observed).

Go back to the Histogram tool, select your signal/condition & statistic, then select Time as aggregation type --> Year. After this, select Add grouping. Again, select Time as aggregation type --> Month of Year. Continue to Execute. The color gradient can be changed by changing the main color in the histogram. Individual bar colors can also be changed by clicking the respective color box in the legend (top right of histogram).

 

Example 3:

This method will produce equally spaced bars in chronological order with no color gradient. To achieve this, we will use Signal from Condition.

First, we need to create our condition. Because we are interested in a Monthly view, we can navigate to our Periodic Condition tool under Identify; Duration-->Monthly (All). Timezone can be specified and any shifts to the resulting capsules can be applied under Advanced.

Now that we have our condition, we can proceed to our Signal from Condition tool under Quantify. As with the other examples, select your signal/condition & statistic. The bounding condition will be the Monthly condition we just created. For this use case, we will want our timestamp to be at the start of each capsule (month), and the interpolation method to be Discrete so that bars will be the resulting output.

 

The output may have skinny bars and non-ideal axis min/max. This can be adjusted by clicking Customize in the Details pane. For this example, I used a width of 50, and axis min/max of 0/1.25.