title: Plotting a histogram in Pandas with very heavy-tailed data
body: <p>I am often working with data that has a very 'long tail'. I want to plot histograms to summarize the distribution, but when I try to using pandas I wind up with a bar graph that has one giant visible bar and everything else invisible.</p>
  
  <p>Here is an example of the series I am working with. Since it's very long, I used value_counts() so it will fit on this page.</p>
  
  <pre><code>In [10]: data.value_counts.sort_index()
  
  Out[10]:
  0          8012
  25         3710
  100       10794
  200       11718
  300        2489
  500        7631
  600          34
  700         115
  1000       3099
  1200       1766
  1600         63
  2000       1538
  2200         41
  2500        208
  2700       2138
  5000        515
  5500        201
  8800         10
  10000        10
  10900       465
  13000         9
  16200        74
  20000       518
  21500        65
  27000        64
  53000        82
  56000         1
  106000       35
  530000        3
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm guessing that the answer involves binning the less common results into larger groups somehow (53000, 56000, 106000, and 53000 into one group of >50000, etc.), and also changing the y index to represent percentages of the occurrence rather than the absolute number. However, I don't understand how I would go about doing that automatically.</p>