Book Image

Matplotlib 2.x By Example

By : Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim
Book Image

Matplotlib 2.x By Example

By: Allen Yu, Claire Chung, Aldrin Yim

Overview of this book

Big data analytics are driving innovations in scientific research, digital marketing, policy-making and much more. Matplotlib offers simple but powerful plotting interface, versatile plot types and robust customization. Matplotlib 2.x By Example illustrates the methods and applications of various plot types through real world examples. It begins by giving readers the basic know-how on how to create and customize plots by Matplotlib. It further covers how to plot different types of economic data in the form of 2D and 3D graphs, which give insights from a deluge of data from public repositories, such as Quandl Finance. You will learn to visualize geographical data on maps and implement interactive charts. By the end of this book, you will become well versed with Matplotlib in your day-to-day work to perform advanced data visualization. This book will guide you to prepare high quality figures for manuscripts and presentations. You will learn to create intuitive info-graphics and reshaping your message crisply understandable.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Basic structure of a Matplotlib figure


A basic Matplotlib figure is made up of multiple components common to different plot types. It will be useful to familiarize ourselves with the terminologies, as we will be using them frequently in plotting. To get you up to speed, we have prepared a glossary of these basic objects. For clearer illustration, here is a plot adapted from Matplotlib's official website that nicely highlights the anatomy of a typical Matplotlib figure:

Glossary of objects in a Matplotlib figure

  • Figure: A figure is the whole plotting area that contains all plot elements. Multiple subplots may be tiled in grid within one figure.
  • Subplot: A subplot is a subregion in a figure that contains all of the relevant data to be displayed on the same axes. We will demonstrate how to create subplots in Chapter 3, Figure Layout and Annotations.
  • Axis: An axis measures the value of a point at a certain position. Most plots contain two axes, x (horizontal) and y (vertical). Sometimes, multiple...