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 1: An Introduction to Julia for Data Visualization and Analysis

Julia is a high-level, general-purpose language that offers a fresh approach to data analysis and visualization. Its clean syntax and high performance make Julia a language worth knowing for any data scientist.

This chapter will introduce the minimum set of concepts and techniques needed for data visualization in Julia. Therefore, we will explore Julia's essential tools for representing, analyzing, and plotting data in a reproducible way. If you are starting with Julia, this chapter is vital to you. Advanced Julia users wanting to learn about the Plots package can benefit from the last section of this chapter.

After reading this chapter, you will know how to set up a Julia reproducible environment for developing your data visualization tasks. You will know how to use Julia and the Plots library to create basic plots, particularly heatmaps, scatter, bar, and line plots.

In this chapter, we're going to cover the following main topics:

  • Getting started with Julia
  • Installing and managing packages
  • Choosing a development environment
  • Knowing the basic Julia types for data visualization
  • Creating basic plots