The ability to create a log-scale histogram is not available in MATLAB. There are a couple of ways to work around this issue,
1. Change the underlying patch object vertices, as follows:
x = -5:0.1:5;
y = randn(100000,1);
hist(y,x);
%Workaround
% Get histogram patches
ph = get(gca,'children');
% Determine number of histogram patches
N_patches = length(ph);
for i = 1:N_patches
% Get patch vertices
vn = get(ph(i),'Vertices');
% Adjust y location
vn(:,2) = vn(:,2) + 1;
% Reset data
set(ph(i),'Vertices',vn)
end
% Change scale
set(gca,'yscale','log')
In this case, note that if the histogram only reports one instance of a value in one of its bins, then you will not see this value. This is because 1 (10^0) is the new baseline value for the y-axis.
2. Use SURFACE objects as shown below in an example:
x1 = [0 1]; y1 = [1 5];
x2 = [1 2]; y2 = [1 15];
x3 = [3 4]; y3 = [1 8];
surface('Xdata',x1,'Ydata',y1,'Zdata',zeros(2),'Cdata',ones(2)*.5)
surface('Xdata',x2,'Ydata',y2,'Zdata',zeros(2),'Cdata',ones(2)*.6)
surface('Xdata',x3,'Ydata',y3,'Zdata',zeros(2),'Cdata',ones(2)*.7)
set(gca,'yscale','log')
set(gca,'ylim',[0 100])
Note that if the boundaries of y include zero, then the surface objects are not drawn correctly since log(0) = -inf.
