Matplotlib

#125 Small multiples for line chart

Let’s say you want to realise a line chart with several lines, one for each group of your dataset. Adding all of them on the same plot can quickly lead to a spaghetti plot, and thus provide a…

Lineplot

#124 Spaghetti plot

Yan Holtz

A Spaghetti plot is a line plot with many lines displayed together. The problem is that it is really hard to read, and thus provide few insight about the data. This is well documented here.…

Lineplot

#123 Highlight a line in line plot

Yan Holtz

In order to avoid the creation of a spaghetti plot, it is a good practice to highlight the group(s) that interests you the most in your line plot. It allows the reader to understand your point quickly,…

Matplotlib

#199 Matplotlib style sheets

Yan Holtz

The matplotlib library comes with several built in styles. It is very easy to use them, and allows to improve the quality of your work. To apply a style to your plot, just add: plt.style.use(“my style”). Here is an example that…

2D density plot

#86 Avoid overlapping in scatterplot with 2D density

Yan Holtz

Consider the scatterplot on the left hand side of this figure. A lot of dots overlap and make the figure hard to read. Even worse, it is impossible to determine how many data points are in each position. In…

2D density plot

#84 Hexbin plot with matplotlib

Yan Holtz

A Hexbin plot is useful to represent the relationship of 2 numerical variables when you have a lot of data point. Instead of overlapping, the plotting window is split in several hexbins, and the number of points per hexbin is…

#370 3D Scatterplot

Yan Holtz

The mplot3D toolkit of Matplotlib allows to easily create 3D scatterplots. Note that most of the customisations presented in the Scatterplot section will work in 3D as well. The result can be a bit disappointing since each…

Matplotlib

#197 Available color palettes with Matplotlib

Yan Holtz

The post #196 describes how to pick up a single color when working with python and matplotlib. This post aims to describe a few color palette that are provided, and thus make your life easier when plotting several color. There…

Matplotlib

#196 Select one color with matplotlib

Yan Holtz

This section aims to describe how to set a color with the matplotlib library of python. These techniques also work for most of the python libraries, since most of them are build on top of matplotlib. Note that another page…

Matplotlib

#194 Split the graphic window with subplot

Yan Holtz

It can be really useful to split your graphic window in several parts, in order to display several charts in the same time. With matplotlib, this is done through the subplot function. It is possible to display your graphics in…

Matplotlib

#220 Sankey diagram with Matplotlib

Yan Holtz

The Matplotlib library has a module that allows to make basic Sankey Diagrams. This is an example coming from the corresponding documentation where you will find more examples of this type. I strongly advise you to have…

Matplotlib

#193 Annotate matplotlib chart

Yan Holtz

Matplotlib

#192 About Matplotlib margins

Yan Holtz

Here are a few thoughts concerning margins management in a Matplotlib chart. As you can see on the left chart, expanding the margins of your plot can be necessary to make the axis labels fully readable. This is easy fix…

Matplotlib

#191 Custom axis on matplotlib chart

Yan Holtz

This page describes several customisations you can apply on the axis of your matplotlib chart. These examples are applied on the X axis but can naturally be imitated for the Y axis!

Matplotlib

#190 Custom Matplotlib title

Yan Holtz

This page aims to explain how to add a title to your python chart, and how to customise it. This is done through the title function of Matplotlib.

Matplotlib

#13 Percent stacked barplot

Olivier Gaudard

A percent stacked barchart is almost the same as a stacked barchart. Subgroups are displayed on of top of each other, but data are normalised to make in sort that the sum of every subgroups…

Matplotlib

#12 Stacked barplot with matplotlib

Olivier Gaudard

If you have groups and subgroups, you probably want to display the subgroups values in a grouped barplot or a stacked barplot. In the first case subgroups are displayed one beside each other, in the second case…

Matplotlib

#11 Grouped barplot

Olivier Gaudard

A grouped barplot is used when you have several groups, and subgroups into these groups. Here is a method to make them using the matplotlib library. Note that you can easily turn it as a stacked…

Barplot

#10 Barplot with number of observation

Yan Holtz

This page explains how to display the number of observation per group on a barplot. Just use the text function of matplotlib to add the label one by one in a loop. If you need to add the…

Barplot

#8 Add confidence interval on barplot

Olivier Gaudard

Consider that you have several groups, and a set of numerical values for each group. A barplot can be used in this condition to represent the average value of each group. However, this kind of figure…

Barplot

#7 Custom barplot layout

Yan Holtz

Here are 3 examples of customisation you could probably need for your barplots.

Bubble

#272 Map a color to bubble plot

Yan Holtz

A bubble plot is a scatterplot with a third dimension: the size of the markers. It is even possible to add a fourth dimension using colors. this is possible using the ‘cmap‘ argument of…

Bubble

#271 Custom your bubble plot

Yan Holtz

The chart #270 describes how to draw a basic bubble plot with matplotlib. This page aims to describe how to custom several features of your bubble plot.

Bubble

#270 Basic Bubble plot

Yan Holtz

A bubble plot is very close to a scatterplot. With Matplotlib, we will construct them using the same scatter function. However, we will use the ‘s‘ argument to map a third numerical variable to the size…

Matplotlib

#255 Percentage stacked area chart

Yan Holtz

A percentage stacked area chart is very close from a classic stacked area chart. However, values are normalised to make in sort that the sum of each group is 100 at each position on the X…

Matplotlib

#253 Control the color in stacked area chart

Yan Holtz

Once you understand how to create a stacked area chart and which baseline option to choose, it’s highly recommended to custom the colors of your chart. Here I propose 2 solutions: the first consists to use a common color palette,…

Matplotlib

#252 Baseline options for stacked area chart

Yan Holtz

The stackplot function of Matplotlib allows to make stacked area chart. It provides a baseline argument that allow to custom the position of the areas around the baseline. Four possibilities exist, and are represented here. This…

Matplotlib

#251 Stacked area chart with seaborn style

Yan Holtz

The graph #250 describes how to realise a stacked area chart with matplotlib. As usual, you can benefit the seaborn style just by loading the library at the beginning of your code: …

Matplotlib

#250 Basic Stacked Area Chart

Yan Holtz

This page describes how to realise a stacked area chart using the Matplotlib library of python. This is done using the stackplot() function. There are 2 ways to use this function, as described below:…

Area

#243 Area chart with white grid

Yan Holtz

Another example of area chart using the white grid seaborn style. This chart has been found on stack overflow, proposed by mwaskom.

Area

#242 Area chart and faceting

Yan Holtz

I believe that area charts are especially useful when used through faceting. It allows to quickly find out the different patterns existing in the data. This example relies on a pandas data frame. We have 2 numerical variables (year and…

Area

#241 Improve area chart

Yan Holtz

The chart #240 describes how to make a basic area chart. This page aims to describe a few customisation you can apply to your area chart. It is highly advised to change the default colour of matplotlib. Moreover, it is…

Area

#240 basic area chart

Yan Holtz

An area chart can easily be done using python and matplotlib. Note that there are 2 main functions allowing to draw them. I advise to use the fill_between function that allows easier customisation. The stackplot function…

Matplotlib

#174 Change background colour of Venn diagram

Yan Holtz

This is just a short example showing how to custom the background colour of your Venn diagram.

Matplotlib

#173 Elaborated Venn diagram

Yan Holtz

This plot comes from the Matplotlib documentation. I think it describes very well the possibilities offered by the matplotlib library in term of Venn diagram. Thanks to the Matplotlib team for providing such a tool…

Matplotlib

#172 Custom Venn diagram

Yan Holtz

The charts #170 and #171 show how to make 2 and 3 groups Venn diagrams respectively. This page aims to give a few keys to custom these graphics. The code of the 3 above examples is provided. The first…

Matplotlib

#171 Basic Venn diagram with 3 groups

Yan Holtz

Here is a basic example of a Venn diagram with 3 groups realised using the Matplotlib library.

Matplotlib

#170 Basic Venn diagram with 2 groups

Yan Holtz

There are 2 main methods to make a Venn diagram with the matplotlib library, leading to the same result. The first consists to give directly the size of your group and their intersection. The second one consists…

Lollipop

#185 Lollipop plot with conditional color

Yan Holtz

This page explain how to have several colors on the same lollipop plot, and how to make this color depends the Y value. Here the color is blue if the value is under 0, orange if…

Lollipop

#184 Lollipop plot with 2 groups

Yan Holtz

This variation of lollipop chart is really useful if you have 2 observations for each groups. Instead of displaying the values of both groups one beside each other, show them on the same line and represent…

Lollipop

#183 Highlight a group in lollipop

Yan Holtz

The graphic #182 shows and explains how to make a vertical lollipop plot. In this chart we add a useful feature for storytelling: highlight a group that specifically interests you with a bigger size and another color!…

Lollipop

#182 Vertical lollipop plot

Yan Holtz

When a lollipop plot shows the relationship between a numerical and a categorical variable. I find it better to order the groups on a decreasing order and represent them vertically. Here is how the code works,…

Lollipop

#181 Custom lollipop plot

Yan Holtz

The graph #180 explains how to make a lollipop plot with Matplotlib, whatever the shape of your data. This page aims to describe the customization you can apply to the 3 main parts: the stem, the markers and the baseline. Note…

Lollipop

#180 Basic lollipop plot

Yan Holtz

This page aims to explain the basic tricks allowing to realize a lollipop plot with matplotlib. Here is a first example with 2 numerical variables, one for each axis. A lollipop plot can be created 1: using…

2D density plot

#83 basic 2D Histograms with matplotlib

Yan Holtz

This page is dedicated to 2D histograms made with matplotlib, through the hist2D function. 2D histograms are useful when you need to analyse the relationship between 2 numerical variables that have a huge number of values. It avoids the over…

Donut

#163 Donut plot with subgroups

Yan Holtz

Here is a donut plot with 3 groups and several subgroups for each. You can set the position of the 2 circle levels using the radius and width options. Then, the idea is to attribute a color palette for each…

Donut

#162 Change background of donut plot

Yan Holtz

Here is a tip to change the background color of your donut chart with matplotlib.

Donut

#161 Custom matplotlib donut plot

Yan Holtz

This page aims to describe how to improve the features of your basic donut plot. It shows how to custom color, labels, and wedges. These first line of code are common to every next examples…

Donut

#160 Basic donut plot

Yan Holtz

Here is a basic donut (?doughnut) plot made using the matplotlib library. The trick here is to make a pieplot and add a white circle in the middle of it. Note that another option would be…

Connected Scatter

#132 Basic connected scatterplot

Yan Holtz

Connected scatterplots are just a mix between scatterplots and linecharts. They are made with the plot function of matplotlib. If you want to custom them, just check the scatter and line sections! …

Matplotlib

#131 Custom a Matplotlib scatterplot

Yan Holtz

Matplotlib allows to make scatter plots with python using the plot function. This page aims to provide a few elements of customization. For every example, we need a few libraries and to create a dataset:

Matplotlib

#130 Basic Matplotlib scatterplot

Yan Holtz

This is a basic scatterplot example made with the plot function of Matplotlib. Once you understood how this works, see plot #131 for more customization.

Lineplot

#122 Multiple lines chart

Yan Holtz

Graphics #120 and #121 show you how to create a basic line chart and how to apply basic customization. This posts explains how to make a line chart with several lines. Each line represents a set of values, for example…

Lineplot

#121 Line chart customization

Yan Holtz

The graph #120 explains how to create a linechart. This post aims to show how to customize it, feature per feature. To realize the following examples, we first need to import libraries and create data:

Lineplot

#120 Line chart with matplotlib

Yan Holtz

A line chart or line graph is a type of chart which displays information as a series of data points called ‘markers’ connected by straight line segments. It is similar to a scatter plot except that the measurement points are…

Area

Use small multiples with matplotlib and seaborn

Yan Holtz

Barplot

#5 Control width and space in barplots

Olivier Gaudard

This post explains 1/ how to control width of bars in a barplot 2/ how to control space between them – with matplotlib.

Barplot

#4 Add title and axis label

Yan Holtz

In this post we show how to add title and axis label to your python chart using matplotlib. Here is an example applied on a barplot, but the same method works for other chart types. …

Barplot

#3 Control color of barplots

Olivier Gaudard

This post aims to describe how to use colors on matplotlib barplots. First, let’s load libraries and create a fake dataset: Now let’s study 3 examples of color utilization:

Barplot

#2 Horizontal barplot

Olivier Gaudard

Here is a tip to turn your barplot horizontal with matplotlib. To do so just call the barh() function instead of bar().

Barplot

#1 Basic Barplot

Olivier Gaudard

This is probably the most basic barplot you can do with python and matplotlib.

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