Book Image

Hands-On Data Visualization with Bokeh

By : Kevin Jolly
Book Image

Hands-On Data Visualization with Bokeh

By: Kevin Jolly

Overview of this book

Adding a layer of interactivity to your plots and converting these plots into applications hold immense value in the field of data science. The standard approach to adding interactivity would be to use paid software such as Tableau, but the Bokeh package in Python offers users a way to create both interactive and visually aesthetic plots for free. This book gets you up to speed with Bokeh - a popular Python library for interactive data visualization. The book starts out by helping you understand how Bokeh works internally and how you can set up and install the package in your local machine. You then use a real world data set which uses stock data from Kaggle to create interactive and visually stunning plots. You will also learn how to leverage Bokeh using some advanced concepts such as plotting with spatial and geo data. Finally you will use all the concepts that you have learned in the previous chapters to create your very own Bokeh application from scratch. By the end of the book you will be able to create your very own Bokeh application. You will have gone through a step by step process that starts with understanding what Bokeh actually is and ends with building your very own Bokeh application filled with interactive and visually aesthetic plots.
Table of Contents (10 chapters)

Building a Bokeh application

Every Bokeh application has a structure to it. This structure helps break the large application down into smaller components that can be built individually and then put back together to render the application as a whole. This structure is illustrated here:

As depicted in the diagram, the first step to building an end-to-end application in Bokeh is to create the plots and widgets that you would like to see in your application. CREATING PLOTS & WIDGETS is a concept that you should be comfortable with at this stage.

The next step is to DEFINE CALLBACK FUNCTION. The callback function is simply a function that tells the application how to respond when a user interacts with your application. For example, if you create a button called Update Plot, the function will update the plot with new data that it retrieves from the web. In other words, the callback...