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

Graph visualization packages

This section will showcase the basics of visualizing graphs in Julia using the GraphPlot, GraphRecipes, and GraphMakie packages. Other packages aim to plot graphs in Julia that we will not cover in this book; among those, there’s TikzGraphs, SankeyPlots, and EcologicalNetworksPlots. Different packages have different strengths; let’s focus on the three that we will explore in this chapter. First, we have the GraphPlot package, which has a straightforward interface. It has a single function, named gplot, with a few keyword arguments that are useful for quickly visualizing graphs. GraphPlot, similar to Gadfly, uses Compose to render the images. Therefore, it produces nice-looking bi-dimensional plots.

Then, we have the GraphRecipes package, which contains a collection of Plots recipes. You can benefit from the different Plots backends when working with this package. GraphRecipes also offers a function for visualizing graphs: graphplot. This...