Why are the whiskers not displayed correctly with boxplots? - python

I would like to plot a boxplot for columns of a dataframe which have percentages and to set the
lower limit to 0 and the upper limit to 100 to detect visually the outliers. However I didn't succeed in plotting the whiskers correctly.
Here I created a column with random percentages with some outliers.
import random
from random import randint
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
random.seed(42)
lst=[]
for x in range(140):
x=randint(1,100)
lst.append(x)
lst.append(-1)
lst.append(300)
lst.append(140)
print(lst)
df = pd.DataFrame({0:lst})
Here is my function:
def boxplot(df,var,lower_limit=None,upper_limit=None):
q1=df[var].quantile(0.25)
q3=df[var].quantile(0.75)
iqr=q3-q1
w1=w2=1.5
if (q1!=q3) and (lower_limit!=None):
w1=(q1-lower_limit)/iqr
if (q1!=q3) and (upper_limit!=None):
w2=(upper_limit-q3)/iqr
plt.figure(figsize=(5,5))
df.boxplot(column=var,whis=(w1,w2))
plt.show()
print(f'The minimum of {var} is',df[var].min(),'and its maximum is ',df[var].max(),"\n")
print(f'The first quantile of {var} is ',q1,'its median is ',df[var].median(),'and its third quantile is ',q3,"\n")
I coded boxplot(df,0,lower_limit=0,upper_limit=100) and I had this result:
But the whiskers don't go to 100 and I would like to know why.

TLDR: I don't think you can do what you want to do. The whiskers must snap to values within your dataset, and cannot be set arbitrarily.
Here is a good reference post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/65390045/13386979.
First of all, kudos on a nice first post. It is great that you provided code to reproduce your problem đź‘Ź There were a few small syntax errors, see my edit.
My impression is that what you want to do is not possible with the matplotlib boxplot (which is called by df.boxplot). One issue is that the units of the whis parameter (when you pass a pair of floats) are in percentiles. Taken from the documentation:
If a pair of floats, they indicate the percentiles at which to draw the whiskers (e.g., (5, 95)). In particular, setting this to (0, 100) results in whiskers covering the whole range of the data.
When you pass lower_limit=0, upper_limit=100 to your function, you end up with w1 == 0.5490196078431373 and w2 == 0.4117647058823529 (you can add a print statement to verify this). This tells the boxplot to extend whiskers to the 0.5th and 0.4th percentile, which are both very small (the boxplot edges are the 25th to 75th percentile). The latter is smaller than the 75th percentile, so the top whisker is drawn at the upper edge of the box.
It seems that you have based your calculation of w1 and w2 based on this section from the documentation:
If a float, the lower whisker is at the lowest datum above Q1 - whis*(Q3-Q1), and the upper whisker at the highest datum below Q3 + whis*(Q3-Q1), where Q1 and Q3 are the first and third quartiles. The default value of whis = 1.5 corresponds to Tukey's original definition of boxplots.
I say this because if you also print q1 - w1 * iqr and q3 + w2 * iqr within your call, you get 0 and 100 (respectively). But this calculation is only relevant when a single float is passed (not a pair).
But okay, then what can you pass to whis to get the limits to be any arbitrary value? This is the real problem: I don't think this is possible. The percentiles will always be a value in your data set (there is no interpolation between points). Thus, the edges of the whiskers always snap to a point in your dataset. If you have a point near 0 and near 100, you could find the corresponding percentile to place the whisker there. But without a point there, you cannot hack the whis parameter to set the limits arbitrarily.
I think to fully implement what you want, you should look into drawing the boxes and whiskers manually. Though the caution shared in the other post I referenced is also relevant here:
But be aware that this is not a box and whiskers plot anymore, so you should clearly describe what you're plotting here, otherwise people will be mislead.

Related

Seaborn KDEPlot - not enough variation in data?

I have a data frame containing ~900 rows; I'm trying to plot KDEplots for some of the columns. In some columns, a majority of the values are the same, minimum value. When I include too many of the minimum values, the KDEPlot abruptly stops showing the minimums. For example, the following includes 600 values, of which 450 are the minimum, and the plot looks fine:
y = df.sort_values(by='col1', ascending=False)['col1'].values[:600]
sb.kdeplot(y)
But including 451 of the minimum values gives a very different output:
y = df.sort_values(by='col1', ascending=False)['col1'].values[:601]
sb.kdeplot(y)
Eventually I would like to plot bivariate KDEPlots of different columns against each other, but I'd like to understand this first.
The problem is the default algorithm that is chosen for the "bandwidth" of the kde. The default method is 'scott', which isn't very helpful when there are many equal values.
The bandwidth is the width of the gaussians that are positioned at every sample point and summed up. Lower bandwidths are closer to the data, higher bandwidths smooth everything out. The sweet spot is somewhere in the middle. In this case bw=0.3 could be a good option. In order to compare different kde's it is recommended to each time choose exactly the same bandwidth.
Here is some sample code to show the difference between bw='scott' and bw=0.3. The example data are 150 values from a standard normal distribution together with either 400, 450 or 500 fixed values.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns; sns.set()
fig, axs = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=3, figsize=(10,5), gridspec_kw={'hspace':0.3})
for i, bw in enumerate(['scott', 0.3]):
for j, num_same in enumerate([400, 450, 500]):
y = np.concatenate([np.random.normal(0, 1, 150), np.repeat(-3, num_same)])
sns.kdeplot(y, bw=bw, ax=axs[i, j])
axs[i, j].set_title(f'bw:{bw}; fixed values:{num_same}')
plt.show()
The third plot gives a warning that the kde can not be drawn using Scott's suggested bandwidth.
PS: As mentioned by #mwascom in the comments, in this case scipy.statsmodels.nonparametric.kde is used (not scipy.stats.gaussian_kde). There the default is "scott" - 1.059 * A * nobs ** (-1/5.), where A is min(std(X),IQR/1.34). The min() clarifies the abrupt change in behavior. IQR is the "interquartile range", the difference between the 75th and 25th percentiles.
Edit: Since Seaborn 0.11, the statsmodel backend has been dropped, so kde's are only calculated via scipy.stats.gaussian_kde.
If the sample has repeated values, this implies that the underlying distribution is not continuous. In the data that you show to illustrate the issue, we can see a Dirac distribution on the left. The kernel smoothing might be applied for such data, but with care. Indeed, to approximate such data, we might use a kernel smoothing where the bandwidth associated to the Dirac is zero. However, in most KDE methods, there is only one single bandwidth for all kernel atoms. Moreover, the various rules used to compute the bandwidth are based on some estimation of the rugosity of the second derivative of the PDF of the distribution. This cannot be applied to a discontinuous distribution.
We can, however, try to separate the sample into two sub-samples:
the sub-sample(s) with replications,
the sub-sample with unique realizations.
(This idea has already been mentionned by johanc).
Below is an attempt to perform this classification. The np.unique method is used to count the occurences of the replicated realizations. The replicated values are associated with Diracs and the weight in the mixture is estimated from the fraction of these replicated values in the sample. The remaining realizations, uniques, are then used to estimate the continuous distribution with KDE.
The following function will be useful in order to overcome a limitation with the current implementation of the draw method of Mixtures with OpenTURNS.
def DrawMixtureWithDiracs(distribution):
"""Draw a distributions which has Diracs.
https://github.com/openturns/openturns/issues/1489"""
graph = distribution.drawPDF()
graph.setLegends(["Mixture"])
for atom in distribution.getDistributionCollection():
if atom.getName() == "Dirac":
curve = atom.drawPDF()
curve.setLegends(["Dirac"])
graph.add(curve)
return graph
The following script creates a use-case with a Mixture containing a Dirac and a gaussian distributions.
import openturns as ot
import numpy as np
distribution = ot.Mixture([ot.Dirac(-3.0),
ot.Normal()], [0.5, 0.5])
DrawMixtureWithDiracs(distribution)
This is the result.
Then we create a sample.
sample = distribution.getSample(100)
This is where your problem begins. We count the number of occurences of each realizations.
array = np.array(sample)
unique, index, count = np.unique(array, axis=0, return_index=True,
return_counts=True)
For all realizations, replicated values are associated with Diracs and unique values are put in a separate list.
sampleSize = sample.getSize()
listOfDiracs = []
listOfWeights = []
uniqueValues = []
for i in range(len(unique)):
if count[i] == 1:
uniqueValues.append(unique[i][0])
else:
atom = ot.Dirac(unique[i])
listOfDiracs.append(atom)
w = count[i] / sampleSize
print("New Dirac =", unique[i], " with weight =", w)
listOfWeights.append(w)
The weight of the continuous atom is the complementary of the sum of the weights of the Diracs. This way, the sum of the weights will be equal to 1.
complementaryWeight = 1.0 - sum(listOfWeights)
weights = list(listOfWeights)
weights.append(complementaryWeight)
The easy part comes: the unique realizations can be used to fit a kernel smoothing. The KDE is then added to the list of atoms.
sampleUniques = ot.Sample(uniqueValues, 1)
factory = ot.KernelSmoothing()
kde = factory.build(sampleUniques)
atoms = list(listOfDiracs)
atoms.append(kde)
Et voilĂ : the Mixture is ready.
mixture_estimated = ot.Mixture(atoms, weights)
The following script compares the initial Mixture and the estimated one.
graph = DrawMixtureWithDiracs(distribution)
graph.setColors(["dodgerblue3", "dodgerblue3"])
curve = DrawMixtureWithDiracs(mixture_estimated)
curve.setColors(["darkorange1", "darkorange1"])
curve.setLegends(["Est. Mixture", "Est. Dirac"])
graph.add(curve)
graph
The figure seems satisfactory, since the continuous distribution is estimated from a sub-sample which size is only equal to 50, i.e. one half of the full sample.

Matplotlib: How to make a histogram with bins of equal area?

Given some list of numbers following some arbitrary distribution, how can I define bin positions for matplotlib.pyplot.hist() so that the area in each bin is equal to (or close to) some constant area, A? The area should be calculated by multiplying the number of items in the bin by the width of the bin and its value should be no greater than A.
Here is a MWE to display a histogram with normally distributed sample data:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
x = np.random.randn(100)
plt.hist(x, bin_pos)
plt.show()
Here bin_pos is a list representing the positions of the boundaries of the bins (see related question here.
I found this question intriguing. The solution depends on whether you want to plot a density function, or a true histogram. The latter case turns out to be quite a bit more challenging. Here is more info on the difference between a histogram and a density function.
Density Functions
This will do what you want for a density function:
def histedges_equalN(x, nbin):
npt = len(x)
return np.interp(np.linspace(0, npt, nbin + 1),
np.arange(npt),
np.sort(x))
x = np.random.randn(1000)
n, bins, patches = plt.hist(x, histedges_equalN(x, 10), normed=True)
Note the use of normed=True, which specifies that we're calculating and plotting a density function. In this case the areas are identically equal (you can check by looking at n * np.diff(bins)). Also note that this solution involves finding bins that have the same number of points.
Histograms
Here is a solution that gives approximately equal area boxes for a histogram:
def histedges_equalA(x, nbin):
pow = 0.5
dx = np.diff(np.sort(x))
tmp = np.cumsum(dx ** pow)
tmp = np.pad(tmp, (1, 0), 'constant')
return np.interp(np.linspace(0, tmp.max(), nbin + 1),
tmp,
np.sort(x))
n, bins, patches = plt.hist(x, histedges_equalA(x, nbin), normed=False)
These boxes, however, are not all equal area. The first and last, in particular, tend to be about 30% larger than the others. This is an artifact of the sparse distribution of the data at the tails of the normal distribution and I believe it will persist anytime their is a sparsely populated region in a data set.
Side note: I played with the value pow a bit, and found that a value of about 0.56 had a lower RMS error for the normal distribution. I stuck with the square-root because it performs best when the data is tightly-spaced (relative to the bin-width), and I'm pretty sure there is a theoretical basis for it that I haven't bothered to dig into (anyone?).
The issue with equal-area histograms
As far as I can tell it is not possible to obtain an exact solution to this problem. This is because it is sensitive to the discretization of the data. For example, suppose the first point in your dataset is an outlier at -13 and the next value is at -3, as depicted by the red dots in this image:
Now suppose the total "area" of your histogram is 150 and you want 10 bins. In that case the area of each histogram bar should be about 15, but you can't get there because as soon as your bar includes the second point, its area jumps from 10 to 20. That is, the data does not allow this bar to have an area between 10 and 20. One solution for this might be to adjust the lower-bound of the box to increase its area, but this starts to become arbitrary and does not work if this 'gap' is in the middle of the data set.

Boxplot on distance Data - set Box manually to values

I have a bunch of 2d points and angles. To visualise the amount of movement i wanted to use a boxplot and plot the difference to the mean of the points.
I sucessfully visualised the angle jitter using python and matplotlib in the following boxplot:
Now i want to do the same for my position Data. After computing the euclidean distance all the data is positive, so a naive boxplot will give wrong results. For an Example see the boxplot at the bottom, points that are exactly on the mean have a distance of zero and are now outliers.
So my Question is:
How can i set the bottom end of the box and the whiskers manually onto zero?
If i should take another approach like a bar chart please tell me (i would like to use the same style though)
Edit:
It looks similar to the following plot at the moment (This a plot of the distance the angle have from their mean).
As you can see the boxplot does't cover the zero. That is correct for the data, but not for the meaning behind it! Zero is perfect (since it represents a points that was exactly in the middle of the angles) but it is not included in the boxplot.
I found out it has already been asked before in this question on SO. While not as exact duplicate, the other question contains the answer!
In matplotlib 1.4 will probably be a faster way to do it, but for now the answer in the other thread seems to be the best way to go.
Edit:
Well it turned out that i couldn't use their approach since i have plt.boxplot(data, patch_artist=True) to get all the other fancy stuff.
So i had to resort to the following ugly final solution:
N = 12 #number of my plots
upperBoxPoints= []
for d in data:
upperBoxPoints.append(np.percentile(d, 75))
w = 0.5 # i had to tune the width by hand
ind = range(0,N) #compute the correct placement from number and width
ind = [x + 0.5+(w/2) for x in ind]
for i in range(N):
rect = ax.bar(ind[i], menMeans[i], w, color=color[i], edgecolor='gray', linewidth=2, zorder=10)
# ind[i] position
# menMeans[i] hight of box
# w width
# color=color[i] as you can see i have a complex color scheme, use '#AAAAAAA' for colors, html names won't work
# edgecolor='gray' just like the other one
# linewidth=2 dito
# zorder=2 IMPORTANT you have to use at least 2 to draw it over the other stuff (but not to high or it is over your horizontal orientation lines
And the final result:

matplotlib radar plot min values

I started with the matplotlib radar example but values below some min values disappear.
I have a gist here.
The result looks like
As you can see in the gist, the values for D and E in series A are both 3 but they don't show up at all.
There is some scaling going on.
In order to find out what the problem is I started with the original values and removed one by one.
When I removed one whole series then the scale would shrink.
Here an example (removing Factor 5) and scale in [0,0.2] range shrinks.
From
to
I don't care so much about the scaling but I would like my values at 3 score to show up.
Many thanks
Actually, the values for D and E in series A do show up, although they are plotted in the center of the plot. This is because the limits of your "y-axis" is autoscaled.
If you want to have a fixed "minimum radius", you can simply put ax.set_ylim(bottom=0) in your for-loop.
If you want the minimum radius to be a number relative to the lowest plotted value, you can include something like ax.set_ylim(np.asarray(data.values()).flatten().min() - margin) in the for-loop, where margin is the distance from the lowest plotted value to the center of the plot.
With fixed center at radius 0 (added markers to better show that the points are plotted):
By setting margin = 1, and using the relative y-limits, I get this output:

These spectrum bands used to be judged by eye, how to do it programmatically?

Operators used to examine the spectrum, knowing the location and width of each peak and judge the piece the spectrum belongs to. In the new way, the image is captured by a camera to a screen. And the width of each band must be computed programatically.
Old system: spectroscope -> human eye
New system: spectroscope -> camera -> program
What is a good method to compute the width of each band, given their approximate X-axis positions; given that this task used to be performed perfectly by eye, and must now be performed by program?
Sorry if I am short of details, but they are scarce.
Program listing that generated the previous graph; I hope it is relevant:
import Image
from scipy import *
from scipy.optimize import leastsq
# Load the picture with PIL, process if needed
pic = asarray(Image.open("spectrum.jpg"))
# Average the pixel values along vertical axis
pic_avg = pic.mean(axis=2)
projection = pic_avg.sum(axis=0)
# Set the min value to zero for a nice fit
projection /= projection.mean()
projection -= projection.min()
#print projection
# Fit function, two gaussians, adjust as needed
def fitfunc(p,x):
return p[0]*exp(-(x-p[1])**2/(2.0*p[2]**2)) + \
p[3]*exp(-(x-p[4])**2/(2.0*p[5]**2))
errfunc = lambda p, x, y: fitfunc(p,x)-y
# Use scipy to fit, p0 is inital guess
p0 = array([0,20,1,0,75,10])
X = xrange(len(projection))
p1, success = leastsq(errfunc, p0, args=(X,projection))
Y = fitfunc(p1,X)
# Output the result
print "Mean values at: ", p1[1], p1[4]
# Plot the result
from pylab import *
#subplot(211)
#imshow(pic)
#subplot(223)
#plot(projection)
#subplot(224)
#plot(X,Y,'r',lw=5)
#show()
subplot(311)
imshow(pic)
subplot(312)
plot(projection)
subplot(313)
plot(X,Y,'r',lw=5)
show()
Given an approximate starting point, you could use a simple algorithm that finds a local maxima closest to this point. Your fitting code may be doing that already (I wasn't sure whether you were using it successfully or not).
Here's some code that demonstrates simple peak finding from a user-given starting point:
#!/usr/bin/env python
from __future__ import division
import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
# Sample data with two peaks: small one at t=0.4, large one at t=0.8
ts = np.arange(0, 1, 0.01)
xs = np.exp(-((ts-0.4)/0.1)**2) + 2*np.exp(-((ts-0.8)/0.1)**2)
# Say we have an approximate starting point of 0.35
start_point = 0.35
# Nearest index in "ts" to this starting point is...
start_index = np.argmin(np.abs(ts - start_point))
# Find the local maxima in our data by looking for a sign change in
# the first difference
# From http://stackoverflow.com/a/9667121/188535
maxes = (np.diff(np.sign(np.diff(xs))) < 0).nonzero()[0] + 1
# Find which of these peaks is closest to our starting point
index_of_peak = maxes[np.argmin(np.abs(maxes - start_index))]
print "Peak centre at: %.3f" % ts[index_of_peak]
# Quick plot showing the results: blue line is data, green dot is
# starting point, red dot is peak location
plt.plot(ts, xs, '-b')
plt.plot(ts[start_index], xs[start_index], 'og')
plt.plot(ts[index_of_peak], xs[index_of_peak], 'or')
plt.show()
This method will only work if the ascent up the peak is perfectly smooth from your starting point. If this needs to be more resilient to noise, I have not used it, but PyDSTool seems like it might help. This SciPy post details how to use it for detecting 1D peaks in a noisy data set.
So assume at this point you've found the centre of the peak. Now for the width: there are several methods you could use, but the easiest is probably the "full width at half maximum" (FWHM). Again, this is simple and therefore fragile. It will break for close double-peaks, or for noisy data.
The FWHM is exactly what its name suggests: you find the width of the peak were it's halfway to the maximum. Here's some code that does that (it just continues on from above):
# FWHM...
half_max = xs[index_of_peak]/2
# This finds where in the data we cross over the halfway point to our peak. Note
# that this is global, so we need an extra step to refine these results to find
# the closest crossovers to our peak.
# Same sign-change-in-first-diff technique as above
hm_left_indices = (np.diff(np.sign(np.diff(np.abs(xs[:index_of_peak] - half_max)))) > 0).nonzero()[0] + 1
# Add "index_of_peak" to result because we cut off the left side of the data!
hm_right_indices = (np.diff(np.sign(np.diff(np.abs(xs[index_of_peak:] - half_max)))) > 0).nonzero()[0] + 1 + index_of_peak
# Find closest half-max index to peak
hm_left_index = hm_left_indices[np.argmin(np.abs(hm_left_indices - index_of_peak))]
hm_right_index = hm_right_indices[np.argmin(np.abs(hm_right_indices - index_of_peak))]
# And the width is...
fwhm = ts[hm_right_index] - ts[hm_left_index]
print "Width: %.3f" % fwhm
# Plot to illustrate FWHM: blue line is data, red circle is peak, red line
# shows FWHM
plt.plot(ts, xs, '-b')
plt.plot(ts[index_of_peak], xs[index_of_peak], 'or')
plt.plot(
[ts[hm_left_index], ts[hm_right_index]],
[xs[hm_left_index], xs[hm_right_index]], '-r')
plt.show()
It doesn't have to be the full width at half maximum — as one commenter points out, you can try to figure out where your operators' normal threshold for peak detection is, and turn that into an algorithm for this step of the process.
A more robust way might be to fit a Gaussian curve (or your own model) to a subset of the data centred around the peak — say, from a local minima on one side to a local minima on the other — and use one of the parameters of that curve (eg. sigma) to calculate the width.
I realise this is a lot of code, but I've deliberately avoided factoring out the index-finding functions to "show my working" a bit more, and of course the plotting functions are there just to demonstrate.
Hopefully this gives you at least a good starting point to come up with something more suitable to your particular set.
Late to the party, but for anyone coming across this question in the future...
Eye movement data looks very similar to this; I'd base an approach off that used by Nystrom + Holmqvist, 2010. Smooth the data using a Savitsky-Golay filter (scipy.signal.savgol_filter in scipy v0.14+) to get rid of some of the low-level noise while keeping the large peaks intact - the authors recommend using an order of 2 and a window size of about twice the width of the smallest peak you want to be able to detect. You can find where the bands are by arbitrarily removing all values above a certain y value (set them to numpy.nan). Then take the (nan)mean and (nan)standard deviation of the remainder, and remove all values greater than the mean + [parameter]*std (I think they use 6 in the paper). Iterate until you're not removing any data points - but depending on your data, certain values of [parameter] may not stabilise. Then use numpy.isnan() to find events vs non-events, and numpy.diff() to find the start and end of each event (values of -1 and 1 respectively). To get even more accurate start and end points, you can scan along the data backward from each start and forward from each end to find the nearest local minimum which has value smaller than mean + [another parameter]*std (I think they use 3 in the paper). Then you just need to count the data points between each start and end.
This won't work for that double peak; you'd have to do some extrapolation for that.
The best method might be to statistically compare a bunch of methods with human results.
You would take a large variety data and a large variety of measurement estimates (widths at various thresholds, area above various thresholds, different threshold selection methods, 2nd moments, polynomial curve fits of various degrees, pattern matching, and etc.) and compare these estimates to human measurements of the same data set. Pick the estimate method that correlates best with expert human results. Or maybe pick several methods, the best one for each of various heights, for various separations from other peaks, and etc.

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