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

Understanding the Plots package

We saw how to create heatmaps and line, scatter, and bar plots using Plots at the end of Chapter 1, An Introduction to Julia for Data Visualization and Analysis. But we have not discussed the package, so let's do that here.

The Plots package is very different from the packages described in this chapter, and it has a pretty unique feature. In the previous section of this chapter, we have seen many plotting libraries available from Julia, each of them with different weaknesses and strengths. But, more importantly, those packages have different interfaces, making it difficult for a user to take advantage of all of them. That is the main problem that Plots solves. To achieve that, Plots offers a single interface that allows you to access the different plotting packages. These packages are Plots' backends.

When creating a plot with Plots, we formulate plotting instructions in a backend-independent way that the Plots library translates and...