Book Image

Interactive Visualization and Plotting with Julia

By : Diego Javier Zea
Book Image

Interactive Visualization and Plotting with Julia

By: Diego Javier Zea

Overview of this book

The Julia programming language offers a fresh perspective into the data visualization field. Interactive Visualization and Plotting with Julia begins by introducing the Julia language and the Plots package. The book then gives a quick overview of the Julia plotting ecosystem to help you choose the best library for your task. In particular, you will discover the many ways to create interactive visualizations with its packages. You’ll also leverage Pluto notebooks to gain interactivity and use them intensively through this book. You’ll find out how to create animations, a handy skill for communication and teaching. Then, the book shows how to solve data analysis problems using DataFrames and various plotting packages based on the grammar of graphics. Furthermore, you’ll discover how to create the most common statistical plots for data exploration. Also, you’ll learn to visualize geographically distributed data, graphs and networks, and biological data. Lastly, this book will go deeper into plot customizations with Plots, Makie, and Gadfly—focusing on the former—teaching you to create plot themes, arrange multiple plots into a single figure, and build new plot types. By the end of this Julia book, you’ll be able to create interactive and publication-quality static plots for data analysis and exploration tasks using Julia.
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
1
Section 1 – Getting Started
6
Section 2 – Advanced Plot Types
12
Section 3 – Mastering Plot Customization

Exploring Gadfly’s customizable components

This section will briefly mention the most notorious differences between Plots and Gadfly plot component nomenclature. In Chapter 5, Introducing the Grammar of Graphics, we described some components of a Gadfly figure. Here, we will highlight Guides, Coordinates, and Scales. Scales determines the scales used by the axes, color, sizes, shapes, and line styles. Coordinates chooses the coordinate system for our axes; however, in Gadfly 1.3, only cartesian coordinates are available.

Finally, Guides offers support for adding and customizing axes, annotations, titles, and keys. The keys generate the legends of the plot; we can have color, shape, and size keys. If the color scale is continuous, the color key will create a color bar rather than something similar to a Plots legend. Gadfly’s Guides will allow you to modify the axes ticks and labels and add rugs. These rugs are short lines that indicate the position in the axes where...