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

Plotting libraries

Unlike languages such as R, Julia doesn't have a built-in plotting solution. This has motivated the Julia community to create various packages for plotting and data visualization. Some of these packages are wrappers around plotting engines from other languages, while others are pure Julia solutions. This section will briefly describe some of the multiple plotting solutions that the Julia package ecosystem offers. It will center on plotting packages with high-level interfaces that allow for data visualization. Therefore, the section will not describe packages defining plotting primitives. Also, it will not list packages derived from the listed ones.

For each package, we will show you the syntax to build a simple line plot with default attributes so that you can get a feeling for it. Also, we will show the created output for some packages. For that, we are going to use the following input data:

x = range(0, 2pi, length=100)
y = sin.(x)

You can create...