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 2: The Julia Plotting Ecosystem

The Julia package ecosystem offers multiple plotting options. Each of them has its strengths and weaknesses. Among those packages, two packages stand out, thanks to their fresh and innovative design: Plots and Makie. These two high-level packages allow you to choose the plotting backend that finally renders the plot.

This chapter will explore some of the most helpful packages for data visualization in the Julia ecosystem. We will explore the original philosophy behind Plots and Makie and learn about their plotting backends. Specifically, we will describe their features for allowing interactive data analysis.

At the end of this chapter, you will be able to make a well-founded decision when choosing a plotting package or backend for your data visualization task. Also, you will be able to take advantage of the backend agnostic plotting instructions that Plots and Makie offer.

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