Book Image

Python Data Visualization Cookbook (Second Edition)

Book Image

Python Data Visualization Cookbook (Second Edition)

Overview of this book

Python Data Visualization Cookbook will progress the reader from the point of installing and setting up a Python environment for data manipulation and visualization all the way to 3D animations using Python libraries. Readers will benefit from over 60 precise and reproducible recipes that will guide the reader towards a better understanding of data concepts and the building blocks for subsequent and sometimes more advanced concepts. Python Data Visualization Cookbook starts by showing how to set up matplotlib and the related libraries that are required for most parts of the book, before moving on to discuss some of the lesser-used diagrams and charts such as Gantt Charts or Sankey diagrams. Initially it uses simple plots and charts to more advanced ones, to make it easy to understand for readers. As the readers will go through the book, they will get to know about the 3D diagrams and animations. Maps are irreplaceable for displaying geo-spatial data, so this book will also show how to build them. In the last chapter, it includes explanation on how to incorporate matplotlib into different environments, such as a writing system, LaTeX, or how to create Gantt charts using Python.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Python Data Visualization Cookbook Second Edition
Credits
About the Authors
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Preface
Index

Creating 3D bars


Although matplotlib is mainly focused on plotting and mainly in two dimensions, there are different extensions that enable us to plot over geographical maps, to integrate more with Excel, and plot in 3D. These extensions are called toolkits in the matplotlib world. A toolkit is a collection of specific functions focused on one topic, such as plotting in 3D.

Popular toolkits are Basemap, GTK Tools, Excel Tools, Natgrid, AxesGrid, and mplot3d.

We will explore more about mplot3d in this recipe. Toolkit mpl_toolkits.mplot3d provides some basic 3D plotting. Plots supported are scatter, surf, line, and mesh plots. Although this is not the best 3D plotting library, it comes with matplotlib, and we are already familiar with the interface.

Getting ready

Basically, we still need to create a figure and add the desired axes to it. The difference is that we are now specifying a 3D projection for the figure and the axes we are adding are Axes3D.

Now, we can use almost the same functions for...