I've been struggling with this problem for days, but haven't yet found an answer on the site, so here goes!
I've made a simple straight line plot made in python, using matplotlib.pyplot - It's essentially a triangle, bounded by two straight lines and the y-axis, with a log-log scale. (I can upload the plot if this isn't a clear description, but I've not enough reputation to do so in this post - Sorry!)
The difficult part is, I now need to fill that triangle (and only that area ideally) with a heat map to show the values of a 3rd parameter, which depends on x and y in an extremely complex way. There's no simple function to describe z(x,y), but I have numerical tables giving the values of z at a range of discrete x and y values.
Is it at all possible to create such a graph (especially bearing in mind that the basic plot also has logarithmic axes)?
Thanks for reading!
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I am unfortunately quite inexperienced with python, and programming in general. I am devoting a lot of time to get better but this one really got me.
I need to evaluate a time evolving funtion happening within the boundaries of a solid, a cube if you like.
My idea was to plot a 3D surface with x, y and z being the dimensions of my solid, and the colormap being the values of the function i mentioned at a given point in time. The final result would be a video with the sequence of plots for a given time interval.
I smashed my head with matplotlib recently but I don't seem to understand the idea behind the need for numpy 2D arrays for surface plotting. The examples given in the docs are somewhat not revelant as my function values come from a numerical solution, hence there is no explicit relation between x,y and z and F(x,y,z).
Does anyone have any suggestion? I hope I haven't been negligent on the doc reading on the topic.
In a standard 3D python plot, each data point is, by default, represented as a sphere in 3D. For the data I'm plotting, the z-axis is very sensitive, while the x and y axes are very general, so is there a way to make each point on the scatter plot spread out over the x and y direction as it normally would with, for example, s=500, but not spread at all along the z-axis? Ideally this would look like a set of stacked discs, rather than overlapping spheres.
Any ideas? I'm relatively new to python and I don't know if there's a way to make custom data points like this with a scatter plot.
I actually was able to do this using the matplotlib.patches library, creating a patch for every data point, and then making it whatever shape I wanted with the help of mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.art3d.
You might look for something called "jittering". Take a look at
Matplotlib: avoiding overlapping datapoints in a "scatter/dot/beeswarm" plot
It works by adding random noise to your data.
Another way might be to reduce the variance of the data on your z-axis (e.g. applying a log-function) or adjusting the scale. You could do that with ax.set_zscale("log"). It is documented here http://matplotlib.org/mpl_toolkits/mplot3d/api.html#mpl_toolkits.mplot3d.axes3d.Axes3D.set_zscale
I am using python to plot points. The plot shows relationship between area and the # of points of interest (POIs) in this area. I have 3000 area values and 3000 # of POI values.
Now the plot looks like this:
The problem is that, at lower left side, points are severely overlapping each other so it is hard to get enough information. Most areas are not that big and they don't have many POIs.
I want to make a plot with little overlapping. I am wondering whether I can use unevenly distributed axis or use histogram to make a beautiful plot. Can anyone help me?
I would suggest using a logarithmic scale for the y axis. You can either use pyplot.semilogy(...) or pyplot.yscale('log') (http://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_api.html).
Note that points where area <= 0 will not be rendered.
I think we have two major choices here. First adjusting this plot, and second choosing to display your data in another type of plot.
In the first option, I would suggest clipping the boundries. You have plenty of space around the borders. If you limit the plot to the boundries, your data would scale better. On top of it, you may choose to plot the points with smaller dots, so that they would seem less overlapping.
Second option would be to choose displaying data in a different view, such as histograms. This might give a better insight in terms of distribution of your data among different bins. But this would be completely different type of view, in regards to the former plot.
I would suggest trying to adjust the plot by limiting the boundries of the plot to the data points, so that the plot area would have enough space to scale the data and try using histograms later. But as I mentioned, these are two different things and would give different insights about your data.
For adjusting you might try this:
x1,x2,y1,y2 = plt.axis()
plt.axis((x1,x2,y1,y2))
You would probably need to make minor adjustments to the axis variables. Note that there should definetly be better options instead of this, but this was the first thing that came to my mind.
I am trying to create a 2D Contour Map in Python that looks like this:
In this case, it is a map of chemical concentration for a number of points on the map. But for the sake of simplicity, we could just say it's elevation.
I am given the map, in this case 562 by 404px. I am given a number of X & Y coordinates with the given value at that point. I am not given enough points to smoothly connect the line, and sometimes very few data points to draw from. It's my understanding that Spline plots should be used to smoothly connect the points.
I see that there are a number of libraries out there for Python which assist in creation of the contour maps similar to this.
Matplotlib's Pyplot Contour looks promising.
Numpy also looks to have some potential
But to me, I don't see a clear winner. I'm not really sure where to start, being new to this programming graphical data such as this.
So my question really is, what's the best library to use? Simpler would be preferred. Any insight you could provide that would help get me started the proper way would be fantastic.
Thank you.
In the numpy example that you show, the author is actually using Matplotlib. While there are several plotting libraries, Matplotlib is the most popular for simple 2D plots like this. I'd probably use that unless there is a compelling reason not to.
A general strategy would be to try to find something that looks like what you want in the Matplotlib example gallery and then modify the source code. Another good source of high quality Matplotlib examples that I like is:
http://astroml.github.com/book_figures/
Numpy is actually a N-dimensional array object, not a plotting package.
You don't need every pixel with data. Simply mask your data array. Matplotlib will automatically plot the area that it can and leave other area blank.
I was having this same question. I found that matplotlib has interpolation which can be used to smoothly connect discrete X-Y points.
See the following docs for what helped me through:
Matplotlib's matplotlib.tri.LinearTriInterpolator docs.
Matplotlib's Contour Plot of Irregularly Spaced Data example
How I used the above resources loading x, y, z points in from a CSV to make a topomap end-to-end
I'm trying to plot a series of rectangles and lines based on a tab delimited text file in matplotlib. The coordinates are quite large in the data and shown be drawn to scale -- except scaled down by some factor X -- in matplotlib.
What's the easiest way to do this in matplotlib? I know that there are transformations, but I am not sure how to define my own transformation (i.e. where the origin is and what the scale factor is) in matplotlib and have it easily convert between "data space" and "plot space". Can someone please show a quick example or point me to the right place?
If you simply use matplotlib's plot function, the plot will fit into one online window, so you don't really need to 'rescale' explicitly. Linearly rescaling is pretty easy, if you include some code sample to show your formatting of the data, somebody can help you in translating the origin and scaling the coordinates.