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

Interactive and reactive plots with Makie

Makie—in particular, its GLMakie backend—was designed to be interactive. Makie builds its interactivity around the Observables package. For example, Makie arguments and attributes can be observables, so the plot automatically reacts to their changes. What is more, Makie extends Observables to make actions helpful in creating more straightforward interactive visualizations. In this section, through an example, we will learn how to create a simple interactive plot while exploiting the tools offered by Makie. We will plot an arc with GLMakie using a slider to choose the internal angle value. Proceed as follows:

  1. Open the Julia REPL on a terminal and execute using GLMakie, to use Makie and its Open Graphics Library (OpenGL) backend. Depending on your machine or the need for precompilation, this step and the following two can take some time.
  2. Execute fig = Figure() to create a new figure. The Figure objects of Makie contain...