ECDF as an Element?

I was thinking of putting together a PR for this, but wanted to see what people thought before investing the effort. I think empirical cumulative distribution functions (ECDFs) are very important plots for visualizing how data are distributed. I argue that because there is no choice of binning or bandwidth, and all data are plotted, they are even better than histograms (hv.Histogram) and KDEs (hv.Distribution). Below is a comparison of a histogram and an ECDF.

I would like to make a new plotting element, hv.ECDF. Are the core devs open to this idea?

[philippjfr]

Just an idea, one might even consider a plot option cumulative=True/False on Distribution, but I haven’t thought that one through.

I think this is the right approach as well. I’d suggest implementing this either as a new operation or as a parameter on the existing univariate_kde operation (if that makes sense) and then expose it as a plot option on hv.Distribution.

[jbednar]

Does any of this discussion need updating now that Elements store reproducible pipelines of the operations used to construct them? It doesn’t have to, but it’s now possible to e.g. get at the underlying data of a histogram whether or not it’s available on .data of a Histogram element.