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

Scraping information from websites


Governments or jurisdictions around the world are increasingly embracing the importance of open data, which aims to increase citizen involvement and informs about decision making, making policies more open to public scrutiny. Some examples of open data initiatives around the world include data.gov (United States of America), data.gov.uk (United Kingdom), and data.gov.hk (Hong Kong).

These data portals often provide Application Programming Interfaces (APIs; see Chapter 4, Visualizing Online Data, for more details) for programmatic access to data. However, APIs are not available for some datasets; hence, we resort to good old web scraping techniques to extract information from websites.

BeautifulSoup (https://www.crummy.com/software/BeautifulSoup/) is an incredibly useful package used to scrape information from websites. Basically, everything marked with an HTML tag can be scraped with this wonderful package, from text, links, tables, and styles, to images...