Are there any alternatives to matplotlib as it comes to plotting tables?
I find it very inconvenient to plot tables in matplotlib. It's hard to make small change of one parameter - table size (scale), font size, cells contents, column widths/heights etc. often requires fine-tuning all other parameters.
There are some alternatives. One of them that you might want to look at is Plotly. Have a look at its documentation and examples showing how to plot interactive tables.
https://plotly.com/python/table/
Suppose I have a dataset with 100k rows (1000 different times, 100 different series, an observation for each, and auxilliary information). I'd like to create something like the following:
(1) first panel of plot has time on x axis, and average of the different series (and standard error) on y axis.
(2) based off the time slice (vertical line) we hover over in panel 1, display a (potentially down sampled) scatter plot of auxilliary information versus the series value at that time slice.
I've looked into a few options for this: (1) matplotlib + ipywidgets doesn't seem to handle it unless you explicitly select points via a slider. This also doesn't translate well to html exporting. This is not ideal, but is potentially workable. (2) altair - this library is pretty sleek, but from my understanding, I need to give it the whole dataset for it to handle the interactions, but it also can't handle more than 5kish data points. This would preclude my use case, correct?
Any suggestions as to how to proceed? Is what I'm asking impossible in the current state of things?
You can work with datasets larger than 5k rows in Altair, as specified in this section of the docs.
One of the most convenient solutions in my opinion is to install altair_data_server and then add alt.data_transformers.enable('data_server') on the top of your notebooks and scripts. This server will provide the data to Altair as long as your Python process is running so there is no need to include all the data as part of the created chart specification, which means that the 5k error will be avoided. The main drawback is that it wont work if you export to a standalone HTML because you rely on being in an environment where the server Python process is running.
I am trying to create colorbar from matplotlib for each data row i.e. each datarow heatmap is defined by its individual colormap. The sample is as shown in this picture.
I tried to solve this problem by merging colormaps, but I can only merge the different colorbars into one.
I did googling for this kind of problem as well as read the documentation from matplotlib but could not find any reliable document for this kind of problem. Is there any procedure to solve this kind of problem. I am currently stuck in the middle of nowhere by this problem.
Altair offers lovely feature to facet charts using facet method. For example, following dataset visualizes nicely:
print(df[['Year', 'Profile', 'Saison', 'Pos']].to_csv())
,Year,Profile,Saison,Pos
0,2017,6.0,Sommer,VL
1,2017,6.0,Winter,VL
13,2017,6.0,Winter,HL
12,2017,6.0,Sommer,HL
18,2017,6.0,Sommer,HR
6,2017,6.0,Sommer,VR
7,2017,6.0,Winter,VR
19,2017,6.0,Winter,HR
14,2018,5.5,Winter,HL
8,2018,5.5,Winter,VR
15,2018,5.5,Sommer,HL
20,2018,4.3,Winter,HR
21,2018,5.0,Sommer,HR
3,2018,5.5,Sommer,VL
2,2018,6.2,Winter,VL
9,2018,4.5,Sommer,VR
17,2019,4.5,Sommer,HL
11,2019,4.2,Sommer,VR
22,2019,3.5,Winter,HR
10,2019,5.28,Winter,VR
5,2019,4.6,Sommer,VL
4,2019,4.9,Winter,VL
16,2019,4.0,Winter,HL
23,2019,4.5,Sommer,HR
with the following command:
alt.Chart(df).mark_bar().encode(x='Year:O', y='Profile:Q').facet(row='Saison:N', column='Pos:N')
But, as you can seem I have still a lot of place horizontally and would like to use it by rearranging Winter plot right next to the Summer plot:
I understand that I already used column grid to facet over attribute Pos, but visually for me Winter and Sommer plots are two separate plots (just like here), which I'd like to place side by side.
I tried to create two different charts in the same cell and using html emit them side by side, but in Jupyter environment there is a limitation on just one Altair/Vega plot per cell.
Is there any method I can use to arrange these charts horizontally?
In Altair, there is no good way to do this, because faceted charts cannot be nested according to the Vega-Lite schema. However, the Vega-Lite renderer actually does handle this in some cases, despite it technically being disallowed by the schema.
So you can hack it by doing something like this:
chart = alt.Chart(df).mark_bar().encode(
x='Year:O',
y='Profile:Q'
).facet('Saison:N')
spec = alt.FacetChart(
data=df,
spec=chart,
facet=alt.Facet('Pos:N')
).to_json(validate=False)
print(spec)
The resulting spec can be pasted by hand into http://vega.github.io/editor to reveal this (vega editor link):
You'll even notice that the vega editor flags parts of the spec as invalid. This is admittedly not the most satisfying answer, but it sort of works.
Hopefully in the future the Vega-Lite schema will add actual support for nested facets, so they can be used more directly from Altair.
I am using matplotlib and a modified version of this example to generate plots in pdf files. So I am plotting each plot on a single page and the results are just fine.
Now I would like to list all the data used in the plots in a rather long table. This table should be placed below the last plot (so not each plot should get its own table).
Is there a way to plot LaTeX like tables in a pdf file using matplotlib?
In principle, you can place almost any TeX stuff onto a plot using something like plt.text(1,2,r'$a^2+b^2=42$'). For aligning equations things like eqnarray work as well, like this. Just don't forget to use raw strings, for otherwise python can misinterpret TeX commands which start with backslashes.
Unless using a plot to write text, I think it is save to say, that it is not possible to only write a table to a matplotlib pdf output file.
Currently I am using tex to write the table and pyPdf to merge the two results. I think this is the cleanest solution to the problem.