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

Chapter 11: Defining Plot Layouts to Create Figure Panels

Sometimes, we need to create figures or plot panels that contain a set of related plots. For example, when making figures for publication in scientific journals, there is usually a constraint on the size and number of figures. In those cases, we need to decide the figure’s layout, determining the placement and relative sizes of the contained plots. A common practice is to export the plots in SVG format and then use a vector graphics editor, such as Inkscape, to define the figure’s layout. However, that practice hampers reproducibility, as changes to the included plots can require us to manually redo the figure. Thankfully, Plots and Makie allow us to layout our figures using Julia code rather than external programs, ensuring reproducibility and easing the figure creation process.

In this chapter, we will learn to compose multiple plots to create complex figures using Plots and Makie. These packages provide excellent...