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

Easy animation using Plots

In this section, we will learn what animations are and how we can create them with Plots. We will also discuss the Animations package, which will help us interpolate between positions. We are also going to take advantage of Animations when working with Makie and Javis. But let's start with the most straightforward animation tool available in Julia: Plots.

Animations are simply a succession of slightly similar images in time that give the sensation of movement. Each of those images is a frame of the animation. The Plots package does precisely that; it provides an Animation object that you can add one frame at a time to. Each frame is a static PNG image that's created using Plots. It's up to us to generate each frame with the slight change that's needed to create a pleasant animation.

We can save animations in different formats. The Plots package offers the following format options:

  • gif: GIF is the most popular and widespread...