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

Interactivity on Jupyter and Pluto notebooks

As Pluto and Jupyter notebooks run in the browser, we can use web technologies—namely, JavaScript, HyperText Markup Language (HTML), and Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)—to interact with our visualizations. This section will showcase some high-level tools, mainly PlutoUI and Interact, which will help us use those technologies’ power from Julia while using Pluto and Jupyter notebooks. Julia plotting libraries that wrap JavaScript ones are suitable for creating interactive plots within notebooks. However, we will see tools that allow us to interact with the visualization, even with static plotting libraries. Let’s dive first into the interactive features of Pluto for data visualization.

Creating interactive visualizations with Pluto

We explored the reactive behavior of Pluto in Chapter 1, An Introduction to Julia for Data Visualization and Analysis. Each time you update a cell, all the cells that depend on that...