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 plot attributes

Plots and Makie offer numerous attributes – keyword arguments – that we can use to determine the aspect of our figures. Describing all of them exceeds the objective of this chapter. Thankfully, both packages provide excellent ways to explore them by ourselves without leaving the Julia REPL or notebook. In this section, we will learn to use those tools using Pluto — we need Pluto version 0.18.3 or higher to see the standard output under the executed cell. Let’s start examining the functions offered by the Plots package to explore its plotting attributes:

  1. Create a new Pluto notebook and execute the following code in the first cell:
    using Plots

Here, we load Plots to access its tools to inspect the different attributes. This cell can take some time to execute.

  1. Create a new cell and execute the following code:
    plotattr(:Axis)

The plotattr function takes Symbol, naming a plot element, and prints the list of...