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 the Grammar of Graphics

Wilkinson’s book, The Grammar of Graphics, defined grammar to express the underlying structure of statistical graphs. This allowed us to go from a fixed set of named graphs, such as scatter or line plots, to a whole range of more complex visualizations. This was possible since grammar sets up the rules to combine different components to create new graphs. The R language adaptation of this grammar, described in Wickham’s article, A Layered Grammar of Graphics, has been the most influential to the Julia ecosystem. This section will discuss the main aspects of this grammar so that we can understand their adaptations to the Julia language.

The main components of a graph, according to the Layered Grammar of Graphics, are as follows:

  • Data: This is a critical part of a plot that’s able to turn an abstract graph specification into a concrete instance for that specific data. We will discuss data and its representation in more...