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

Introducing Makie

Makie, like Plots, is a high-level plotting package that relies on different backends for rendering. Makie was born from the Plots philosophy while trying to solve some of its problems. The strengths and issues of Plots come from the fact that it has high-level plotting libraries as backends. Makie instead relies on low-level backends, allowing it to have more control. This control permits Makie to be a fast plotting library with excellent interactive features.

There are three primary backends for Makie:

  • GLMakie: This uses OpenGL to render the plots, so it is quick and allows the visualization of large datasets. Makie enables you to visualize the plots using a GLFW window. You can use it to create interactive plots, and it has excellent support for 3D plots. It is the backend that supports most of the Makie features. It only requires a graphic card that supports OpenGL version 3.3 or higher.
  • CairoMakie: This focuses on the creation of publication-quality...