Posts tagged matplotlib
Visualizing Dropped Video Frames
- 18 October 2023
Welcome back, everyone! This week on Cameron’s Corner, I’m going to get a bit creative. I want to take you through my process for optimizing the (many) Python instruction videos I make.
But, first, I want to let you know about my upcoming seminar, “Arrow & In-Memory Data”! This seminar is designed to provide attendees with a comprehensive understanding of Arrow and its interface with PyArrow, a Python library for working with Arrow data structures.
Dataviz Makeover
- 27 September 2023
Hello, everyone! Two weeks ago, I re-created a data visualization I found online and I had so much fun that I decided to do it again! This week I’m recreating another visualization from Data is Beautiful on Reddit.
But, before we get started, I want to let you know about my seminar coming up next week, “Understanding Textual,” which is part of our Investigating the Hype seminar series! This series offers an in-depth exploration of different software that will help make your code more efficient. We’ll dive into Textual, DuckDB, Polars, and Apache Arrow and see if they’re really worth all the hype! I have some great things planned, so you won’t want to miss it!
Business Jet Demand In North America
- 13 September 2023
Hello, everyone! This week, I’m recreating a visualization from Data is Beautiful on Reddit.
Before I get started, I want to remind you of the final part of the Correctness seminar series, “How do I Check that my Data and Analyses are Correct?”. We’ll join James Powell as he unravels the art of performing data analysis with confidence in Python. Explore the challenges of data analysis pipelines and learn how to write robust analyses that have observable hooks. Discover methods for data cleaning and validation to avoid silent errors that can pollute your results.
Time-series Alignment & Viz
- 16 August 2023
Hey all, welcome back to Cameron’s Corner. This week, we are taking an even deeper dive into our use of Gantt charts to represent binary signals. We’ll certainly cover visualizing these data but I also want to get into some of the signal processing tricks we can apply to align multiple signals against each other.
Speaking of visualization, don’t forget to join me on August 17th for a FREE seminar, “Visualizations: Exploratory → Communicative,” where I’ll demonstrate how to harness the power of Matplotlib to create impactful data visualizations. From exploratory analysis to communicative visualizations, I’ll guide you through uncovering insights and effectively conveying your message. Discover the techniques to profile your audience, focus their attention, and deliver precise and compelling data visualizations.
Gantt Charts in Matplotlib
- 09 August 2023
Hey everyone! Welcome to this week’s entry into Cameron’s Corner. This week, I’ve been busy teaching courses, working on some exciting TOPS updates, and helping James prep for a FREE popup seminar coming up on August 10th, “Solving Uno… the Right Way!” I can’t wait for you to see what he in store.
For today’s post, I wanted to share a fun consulting project I’m working on which involves visualizing binary signals (on/off states) across multiple devices. These types of data are often visualized using stateful lines where they rapidly increase to a value of 1 to indicate an “on” state or drop to 0 to indicate an “off” state. However, for the volume of data that we are working with, the vertical lines become nearly impossible to track because there is no ramp-up in our signal.
Get Rid of Those Legends!
- 03 May 2023
Hey everyone! I’m back with some more data viz! This past week, I received a question about labeling a line chart in Matplotlib without a legend. While there are a few examples demonstrating this idea, I wanted to write up a quick blog post on the topic.
At DUTC, we advocate for the removal of legends in charts whenever possible. Legends cause “jumps” of attention for your audience, meaning that they need to rapidly glance back and forth between data and legend to make sense of the chart.
Useful Multiple-Axis Plots
- 26 April 2023
Welcome back to Cameron’s Corner! This week, in preparation for my upcoming seminar, Intro to Bayesian Stats in Python, we’re diving into some (more) data visualization!
I wanted to talk about a question I recently received about Matplotlib, “How do you create a dual-axis chart that conveys unit information?” In my opinion, this is a context where a dual-axis chart is usable and won’t mistakenly mislead your audience. Instead of using a second axis to communicate data about a different series of data, we can use a second axis to communicate supplementary information about a single series of data.
Hierarchical Bar Charts in Matplotlib
- 12 April 2023
If you’ve heard me talk about bar charts in Matplotlib, then you’ve probably heard
me say that the thing I enjoy the least is creating grouped/hierarchical
bar charts. Typically, I dish this responsibility over to methods/packages like
pandas or seaborn, but, this week, I wanted to share my favorite fun way to create a grouped barchart in pure Matplotlib.
You may wonder what makes grouped bar charts tricky to create and the answer lies in a core assumption: all data is continuous. That’s right, Matplotlib has no notion of an inherently categorical Axis, despite methods like Axes.bar making it seem like our x-axis is categorical. While this approach is very flexible, it also means that, if we want to create grouped bar charts, we need to manually track the positions of each of our categories & subcategories. While this doable, it can be tedious, which is one of the reasons tools like seaborn exist.
A Funnel Chart in Matplotlib
- 29 March 2023
Hey there again! This week, I wanted to share a small snippet of what I will cover in my seminar “My Matplotlib can beat up your Matplotlib” on March 30th.
This seminar focuses on creating plots that are not directly offered by Matplotlib—or even other high-level API’s like seaborn (though admittedly plotly does
have many of these plots). We’re not talking about bar charts or box plots, we’re
talking about “funnel charts,” “tree diagrams,” “sunbursts,” “waffle charts,”
and “parallel coordinates/categories.” If you don’t want to install a third-party
dependency just to create a plot, then I’ll have you covered in the seminar! In addition to highlighting these varied chart types, I will also cover the Matplotlib concepts you need to create truly out-of-the-box charts.
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.