Histplot errorbars

[meisonlikesicecream]

I find the documentation of the histplot function [0] slightly confusing/contradictive. I stumbled upon this when I wanted to plot a simple weighted 1D histogram with sqrt(w2) errorbars (which I assumed was the default, but apparently not). I have not checked if the following issues are true for histtypes other than histtype=‘errorbar’.

This line about the yerr parameter "Following modes are supported: - True, sqrt(N) errors or poissonian interval when w2 is specified" [1] makes it sound like if yerr == True, then sqrt(N) is used for the errors if w2 is NOT specified, and that the poissonian interval is used if w2 IS specified. However, this is not the case: it always does the poissonian interval even if w2 is None because in the Plottable class definition it always initialises with the method “poisson” [2], which therefore, will always run the poissonian interval [3]. If w2 is specified, and yerr!=None, then it crashes because of [4].

This leads me to another confusion: which error calculation do we want for weighted histograms? The following line about the w2 parameter "Sum of the histogram weights squared for poissonian interval error calculation" [5] makes it sound like we always want to use the poissonian error for weighted histograms, while this line "If w2 has integer values (likely to be data) poisson interval is calculated, otherwise the resulting error is symmetric sqrt(w2)" [6] makes it sound like the poisson interval should only be used for integer values. Again, "sqrt" is never used if w2method is None because of [3], even if w2 has integer values.

Also, if you specify to use the “sqrt” method, it never uses the variances (i.e. w2) for calculating the errors [7]...

I'm happy submit a PR if someone can explain what the intended usage is :-)

0. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/plot.py#L57
1. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/plot.py#L95
2. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/utils.py#L154
3. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/utils.py#L183
4. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/plot.py#L280
5. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/plot.py#L99
6. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/plot.py#LL104C12-L106C89
7. https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/master/src/mplhep/utils.py#L193-L194

[nsmith-]

For sure the sqrt method should be using variances (sumw2), so that's a bug. As for the rest of the plumbing, there is some attempt to do scaled Poisson in https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/9b47e92944f1d95617b2409d18e1f540edbb77d8/src/mplhep/error_estimation.py#L11-L31 for the case where sumw2 is available. So in practice, it will be very close to sqrt(N) for reasonably large N. Nevertheless, one may prefer to be using exactly sqrt(sumw2) the documentation and the code should be synchronized, and I'm sure the maintainers would be happy to receive a PR to correct this.

In the meantime, you can pass a custom error function to mplhep.histplot(..., w2method=mymethod) where

def mymethod(sumw, sumw2):
    return np.array([sumw - np.sqrt(sumw2), sumw + np.sqrt(sumw2)])

[tomeichlersmith]

I came across this issue while trying to do another task with the histplot errorbars. Basically, my goal is to not draw the error bars for the bins without any content. Usually, this isn't a huge issue since the bins with content dwarf the bins without content and therefore the error bars on the bins without content do not rise above the x-axis into the figure; however, in the case where I am plotting on a log scale and the bin content traverses many orders of magnitude, the bins without content do show up in the plot.

This problem can be replicated with a short hist creation.

h = hist.Hist.new.Reg(10,0,1).Weight()
h.fill(
    [0., 0.5, 0.6, 0.7, 0.8, 0.9],
    weight = [3., 1e3, 1e4, 1e5, 1e6, 1e7]
)

Now with h defined, we can look at various methods of plotting the error bars.

h.plot()
plt.yscale('log')

We can mask out the error bars by setting the bins with a nan lo poisson estimate to 0.

def poisson_interval_ignore_empty(sumw, sumw2):
    interval = mplhep.error_estimation.poisson_interval(sumw, sumw2)
    lo, hi = interval[0,...], interval[1,...]
    to_ignore = np.isnan(lo)
    lo[to_ignore] = 0.0
    hi[to_ignore] = 0.0
    return np.array([lo,hi])
mplhep.histplot(h.values(), bins=h.axes[0].edges, w2method = poisson_interval_ignore_empty, w2 = h.variances())
plt.yscale('log')

The process of developing this solution actually showed me that the current function does not actually set nan to zero. You should use np.isnan(interval) rather than interval == np.nan in the line below. Maybe this tip is just an addition to the docs or maybe it can included as a named method?

https://github.com/scikit-hep/mplhep/blob/566f8bfa6ae129675a1861613d6955d8a520af5b/src/mplhep/error_estimation.py#L53C1-L53C77

[andrzejnovak]

It might make sense as an additional method, but it's maybe not trivial if there is 0 uncertainty for 0 events yield in poison stats cf. https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/427019/confidence-interval-for-mean-of-poisson-with-only-zero-counts