Histogram at specific coordinates inside axes

Question

What I want to achieve with Python 3.6 is something like this :

Obviously made in paint and missing some ticks on the xAxis. Is something like this possible? Essentially, can I control exactly where to plot a histogram (and with what orientation)?

I specifically want them to be on the same axes just like the figure above and not on separate axes or subplots.

fig = plt.figure()
ax2Handler = fig.gca()
ax2Handler.scatter(np.array(np.arange(0,len(xData),1)), xData)
ax2Handler.hist(xData,bins=60,orientation='horizontal',normed=True)

This and other approaches (of inverting the axes) gave me no results. xData is loaded from a panda dataframe.

# This also doesn't work as intended
fig = plt.figure()
axHistHandler = fig.gca()
axScatterHandler = fig.gca()
axHistHandler.invert_xaxis()
axHistHandler.hist(xData,orientation='horizontal')
axScatterHandler.scatter(np.array(np.arange(0,len(xData),1)), xData)

Answer 1

A. using two axes

There is simply no reason not to use two different axes. The plot from the question can easily be reproduced with two different axes:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use("ggplot")
xData = np.random.rand(1000)

fig,(ax,ax2)= plt.subplots(ncols=2, sharey=True)
fig.subplots_adjust(wspace=0)

ax2.scatter(np.linspace(0,1,len(xData)), xData, s=9)
ax.hist(xData,bins=60,orientation='horizontal',normed=True)
ax.invert_xaxis()
ax.spines['right'].set_visible(False)
ax2.spines['left'].set_visible(False)
ax2.tick_params(axis="y", left=0)

plt.show()

B. using a single axes

Just for the sake of answering the question: In order to plot both in the same axes, one can shift the bars by their length towards the left, effectively giving a mirrored histogram.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use("ggplot")
xData = np.random.rand(1000)

fig,ax= plt.subplots(ncols=1)
fig.subplots_adjust(wspace=0)

ax.scatter(np.linspace(0,1,len(xData)), xData, s=9)
xlim1 = ax.get_xlim()
_,__,bars = ax.hist(xData,bins=60,orientation='horizontal',normed=True)

for bar in bars:
    bar.set_x(-bar.get_width())

xlim2 = ax.get_xlim()
ax.set_xlim(-xlim2[1],xlim1[1])

plt.show()

Answer 2

You might be interested in seaborn jointplots:

# Import and fake data
import seaborn as sns
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = np.random.randn(2,1000)
# actual plot
jg = sns.jointplot(data[0], data[1], marginal_kws={"bins":100})
jg.ax_marg_x.set_visible(False) # remove the top axis
plt.subplots_adjust(top=1.15) # fill the empty space

produces this:

See more examples of bivariate distribution representations , available in Seaborn.