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 3: Getting Interactive Plots with Julia

Interactive visualization is critical for analyzing large and complex datasets, where static plots can show only some aspects. Through interaction, it is possible to explore data more profoundly, which could lead us to formulate new hypotheses or gain further insight into the task at hand.

Julia is a dynamic programming language that lets us be in the loop thanks to its advanced read-eval-print loop (REPL). However, the interactivity we can get with Julia goes even further, thanks to a whole series of packages that significantly improve our experience when analyzing and visualizing data. We have introduced some of those packages in the previous chapters: Plots, Makie, Pluto, and IJulia. In this chapter, we will learn how to use them to create interactive visualizations.

You will learn in this chapter many ways to get interactive visualizations using Julia. We will explore interactive plotting libraries, emphasizing Makie and Plotly...