UP AND RUNNINGMATPLOTLIB

Hi

OUTLINE

▸ Understanding matplotlib

▸ History of matplotlib

▸ The Anatomy of maptlotlib

▸ The Interfaces of matplotlib

▸ Overview of the pyplot interface

▸ Uses for matplotlib

HISTORYMATPLOTLIB

JOHN HUNTER (1968 - 2012)

THE DONGLE PROBLEM

MATPLOTLIB (1.0)

▸ Was meant to be an alternative to MATLAB

▸ Created by John Hunter for examining data from epileptic patients

MATPLOTLIBTHE ANATOMY OF

ANATOMY OF A GRAPHIC

▸ The Figure contains and manages all elements in a graphic

▸ Key architectural decision was to separate the Figure from the act of rendering

THREE DISTINCT LAYERS

▸ Scripting Layer (pyplot)

▸ Artist Layer

▸ Everything in a graphic is an Artist

▸ Knows how to “draw” itself

▸ Backend Layer

▸ Presents a generic drawing interface (e.g., draw_point, draw_line, etc.)

▸ Interacts with the “physical” world

BACKEND LAYER

SCRIPTING LAYER

ARTIST LAYER

THE INTERFACESMATPLOTLIB

THREE INTERFACES OF MATPLOTLIB

▸ pylab (deprecated)

▸ pyplot

▸ The Object-Oriented API

PYLAB

▸ Pros

▸ Least verbose

▸ Cons

▸ Imports everything into global space

▸ When?

▸ It’s deprecated

▸ Ok, fine, one-off, “throwaway” code only!

PYPLOT

▸ Pros

▸ Namespaces!

▸ Cons

▸ Less control

▸ When?

▸ Interactive data exploration

▸ Small batch visualizations

THE OBJECT-ORIENTED API

▸ Pros

▸ Total control

▸ Cons

▸ Syntactically heavy

▸ When?

▸ Embedding

▸ Large batch visualizations

THE SCRIPTING INTERFACEMATPLOTLIB

PYLOT

▸ MATLAB-like

▸ procedural

▸ stateful

STATEFUL INTERFACE

plt.plot(x, y) plt.gca() plt.gcf()

FIGURE 1

FIGURE 2

FIGURE 3

FIGURE 3

fig.clf()

DEMO TIME

MATPLOTLIB 1.5.0 IS OUT -- STILL ALIVE AN[D] KICKING WITH PANDAS DATAFRAME SUPPORT AND PRETTY SEABORN STYLES

rasbt - r/Python

THE FUTURE

▸ Modern Libraries

▸ Seaborn

▸ ggplot

▸ mpld3 and bokeh (for the web)

▸ Spyre

▸ New (and Custom) styles