Posts tagged matplotlib
Tufte Weather In Matplotlib
- 08 March 2023
Hello, everyone! Welcome back to Cameron’s Corner. This week, I want to dive into a topic of particular and personal interest to me: the origins of data visualization. In fact, I’m so passionate about it, I’ll be hosting a seminar on March 17th, “Spot the Misleading Data Visualization!”
Edward Tufte is one of the pioneers of modern-day data visualization. In his work, he is brilliantly able to distill core concepts that can then be applied to nearly any form of visual communication. If you aren’t familiar with his work and are interested in the topic of data visualization in general, I highly recommend Tufte’s book, “The Visual Display of Quantitative Information”.
Matplotlib: Arbitrary Precision
- 07 December 2022
It’s no secret that matplotlib is one of my favorite tools in Python (sorry, pandas, I promise you’re a close second). But, I’m not sure if I’ve shared why I think matplotlib is such a great tool. I don’t love it because of its redundant APIs or simply because I’m familiar with it, I think matplotlib is a great tool because it has near-infinite flexibility. I refer to this as “arbitrary precision” as you can be as precise or imprecise as you want.
Want to put a Polygon in some arbitrary location?
Happy Thanksgiving!
- 23 November 2022
Hi all, for the upcoming US holiday, I wanted to share some some turkey with all of you! Actually though, which I managed to make a turkey in everyone’s favorite drawing tool matplotlib.
While I would not recommend doing this, it was a fun way to learn more about some of the lower level interfaces that matplotlib offers. I hope you all enjoy the holiday if you are celebrating!
The Central Limit Theorem - Visualized
- 28 September 2022
We have exciting things coming up at DUTC! Our “No-Tears Code Review” workshop series is almost here: get actually meaningful feedback on your code, working directly with our instructors and a small cohort of attendees. Register for the series here and get 20% off!
For this week, I’m finally sharing the code I wrote to produce my visualization demonstrating the Central Limit Theorem! But before we get to the code, I wanted to discuss the impact of this visualization and how it can be interpreted.
Estimating The Standard Deviation of a Population from a Sample
- 31 August 2022
- English
Welcome back to another edition of Cameron’s Corner! We have some exciting events coming up, including a NEW seminar series and a code review workshop series. In our brand new seminar series, we will share with you some of the hardest problems we have had to solve in pandas and NumPy (and, in our bonus session, hard problems that we have had to solve in Matplotlib!). Then, next month starting October 12th, we will be holding our first ever “No Tears Code Review,” where we’ll take attendees througha a code review that will actually help them gain insight into their code and cause meaningful improvements to their approach.
For Cameron’s Corner this week, I wanted to take some time to talk about another statistical visualization I’m working on that covers Bessel’s Correction. Ready for some advanced matplotlib with a sprinkle of statistics? Let’s dive in!
Matplotlib Legends: Artists & Handlers
- 17 August 2022
Hey all, got some matplotlib for you this week. I wanted to start touching on some more advanced ideas about it and decided to demonstrate a question I answered on Stack Overflow not long ago.
The question asked about custom legend artists- essentially asking “How can I change the style of the artists matplotlib presents in a given legend.” While the longest way to do this is to construct a Legend manually, thankfully matplotlib provides an escape hatch in the form of the handler_map argument.
Working with Long Labels In Matplotlib
- 20 July 2022
Hey all, I came across a fun blog post covering how to work with long tick labels in R’s ggplot2. I couldn’t resist the urge to recreate the visualizations in matplotlib and wanted to share with you how you can deal with long tick labels in Python!
First we’ll need some data- using the same source as the above linked blog post, we can fetch and process our data like so:
Matplotlib: Place Things Where You Want
- 18 May 2022
I have recently done a couple of seminars on matplotlib. Among these seminars I demonstrate how to conceptually approach matplotlib: its 2 apis, convenience layers vs essential layers, dichotomous artist types, and coordinate systems/transforms.
Once you understand these ideas, the entire utility of matplotlib begins to snap into place. This week, I want to highlight one of these concepts: coordinate systems & transforms. The first step to making an aesthetically appealing graphic is to have confidence in placing Artists where you want them. Their existance (or lack thereof) on your Figure should not be a surprise, and by understanding matplotlibs coordinate systems we gain more power over the aesthetic of our plots.