Previously, I had a problem with the interference between multiple Matplotlib figures. Finally i got tracked that to an issue that some pyplot functions do not attach to their figure instance but can be rendered in some other figure instances which are created in parallel.
Here is some example code:
from django.http import HttpResponse
from numpy import arange, meshgrid
from matplotlib.mlab import bivariate_normal
def show_chart(request):
delta = 0.025
x = arange(-3.0, 3.0, delta)
y = arange(-2.0, 2.0, delta)
X, Y = meshgrid(x, y)
Z1 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
Z2 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.5, 0.5, 1, 1)
Z = 10.0 * (Z2 - Z1)
from matplotlib.pyplot import figure, contour
fig1 = figure(figsize=(4, 4), facecolor='white')
contour(X, Y, Z)
response = HttpResponse(content_type='image/png')
fig1.savefig(response, format='png')
fig1.clear()
return response
The contour pyplot function in the example above can get rendered in fig1, but occasionally also in some other figure that is generated in parallel. That is very annoying. Is there any way to attach the contour pyplot function to fig1?
As a bit of explanation of what is going on here, matplotlib has two semi-independent interfaces; the state machine and the OO interface.
The state machine code is designed for working in an interactive shell (and mimics matlab's interface). It does this by wrapping the OO interface in a set of commands that keep track of what the current figure and axes are. When you use the command from matplotlib.pyplot (I suspect you have an from matploblib.pyplot import * in your code) in is more or less equivalent to doing gcf().gca().contour(...). When you create a new figure, it is automatically made current (which is what you want if you are using this in an iteractive shell) so the behavior you see is the 'correct' behavior. The state machine interface also has code in it to make sure figures get re-drawn when they need to, manage the gui event loops, etc (all the things you need to do to make the interactive interface work smoothly). As hayden mentioned in comments, running ipython --pylab will automatically run from matplotlib.pyplot import *, which gives you a very nice interactive shell.
The OO interface is designed for programmatic dealing with matplotlib. What it adds in verbosity (you now have to do most of the work of the state machine), it makes up for in clarity. In the OO model, most (maybe all) of the plotting functions are associated with Axes objects (doc) (as there can be more than one axes associated with a figure (ex subplots using gridspec).
An alternate way to solve your problem is
ax = fig1.gca()
which will grab the current axes from fig1, creating one if necessary. This may be helpful if you keep track of your figure objects, but not your axes objects and want to add another graph to the figure.
You can create a subplot and than call the contour method of the subplot:
fig1 = figure(figsize=(4, 4), facecolor='white')
ax = fig1.add_subplot(111)
ax.contour(X, Y, Z)
plt.subplots makes it convenient to create a figure and subplots with a single call:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
Related
I want to plot a graph with one logarithmic axis using matplotlib.
I've been reading the docs, but can't figure out the syntax. I know that it's probably something simple like 'scale=linear' in the plot arguments, but I can't seem to get it right
Sample program:
import pylab
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
a = [pow(10, i) for i in range(10)]
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(2, 1, 1)
line, = ax.plot(a, color='blue', lw=2)
pylab.show()
You can use the Axes.set_yscale method. That allows you to change the scale after the Axes object is created. That would also allow you to build a control to let the user pick the scale if you needed to.
The relevant line to add is:
ax.set_yscale('log')
You can use 'linear' to switch back to a linear scale. Here's what your code would look like:
import pylab
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
a = [pow(10, i) for i in range(10)]
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(2, 1, 1)
line, = ax.plot(a, color='blue', lw=2)
ax.set_yscale('log')
pylab.show()
First of all, it's not very tidy to mix pylab and pyplot code. What's more, pyplot style is preferred over using pylab.
Here is a slightly cleaned up code, using only pyplot functions:
from matplotlib import pyplot
a = [ pow(10,i) for i in range(10) ]
pyplot.subplot(2,1,1)
pyplot.plot(a, color='blue', lw=2)
pyplot.yscale('log')
pyplot.show()
The relevant function is pyplot.yscale(). If you use the object-oriented version, replace it by the method Axes.set_yscale(). Remember that you can also change the scale of X axis, using pyplot.xscale() (or Axes.set_xscale()).
Check my question What is the difference between ‘log’ and ‘symlog’? to see a few examples of the graph scales that matplotlib offers.
if you want to change the base of logarithm, just add:
plt.yscale('log',base=2)
Before Matplotlib 3.3, you would have to use basex/basey as the bases of log
You simply need to use semilogy instead of plot:
from pylab import *
import matplotlib.pyplot as pyplot
a = [ pow(10,i) for i in range(10) ]
fig = pyplot.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(2,1,1)
line, = ax.semilogy(a, color='blue', lw=2)
show()
I know this is slightly off-topic, since some comments mentioned the ax.set_yscale('log') to be "nicest" solution I thought a rebuttal could be due. I would not recommend using ax.set_yscale('log') for histograms and bar plots. In my version (0.99.1.1) i run into some rendering problems - not sure how general this issue is. However both bar and hist has optional arguments to set the y-scale to log, which work fine.
references:
http://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_api.html#matplotlib.pyplot.bar
http://matplotlib.org/api/pyplot_api.html#matplotlib.pyplot.hist
So if you are simply using the unsophisticated API, like I often am (I use it in ipython a lot), then this is simply
yscale('log')
plot(...)
Hope this helps someone looking for a simple answer! :).
I am working with matplotlib to generate some graphs but I do not know the difference between these two ways of showing an image. I already read some documentation about it but I do not understand yet.
First way:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure()
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.show()
Second way:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
graph = plt.figure()
plt.plot(x, y)
graph.show()
I think this two ways do not do the same thing but it is not clear to me.
Could someone explain it step by step for the two ways?
Simplified, plt.show() will start an event loop and create a graphical representation for each figure that is active inside the pyplot state.
In contrast, fig.show(), where fig is a figure instance, would show only this figure. Since it would also not block, it is (only) useful in interactive sessions; else the figure would be closed directly after showing it due to the script exiting.
In the usual case you would hence prefer plt.show(). This does not prevent you from using the object-oriented interface. A recommended way of creating and showing a figure is hence,
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)
plt.show()
For two windows you can just repeat the plotting,
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()
ax1.plot(x1, y1)
fig2, ax2 = plt.subplots()
ax2.plot(x2, y2)
plt.show()
Matplotlib has two styles of API implemented. One is object based (graph.show()) and the other is procedural (plt.show()) and looks a lot like the Matlab plotting API.
The procedural API works on the current figure and/or set of axes. You can always getting the current figure with plt.gcf() and the current axes with plt.gca().
There are occasionally some slight differences in syntax here and there. For example, if you want to set the x axis limits:
plt.xlim([0, 10])
or
ax = plt.gca()
ax.set_xlim([0, 10])
plt.figure returns an object that is assigned with graph = plt.figure() to graph . this is used when specific characteristics of this object ( the plot ) are intended to be changed, now the object can be refered to by its instance graph ( object-based plotting )
you use this i.e. if you want to access the axes of the graph or labels, subplots, ...
see https://python4mpia.github.io/plotting/advanced.html for object-based plotting
to manipulate the plot object you have to get a reference to it ( handle ) and this is done by graph = plt.figure() ( cf Object-Oriented Programming )
This question explains how to change the "camera position" of a 3D plot in matplotlib by specifying the elevation and azimuth angles. ax.view_init(elev=10,azim=20), for example.
Is there a similar way to specify the zoom of the figure numerically -- i.e. without using the mouse?
The only relevant question I could find is this one, but the accepted answer to that involves installing another library, which then also requires using the mouse to zoom.
EDIT:
Just to be clear, I'm not talking about changing the figure size (using fig.set_size_inches() or similar). The figure size is fine; the problem is that the plotted stuff only takes up a small part of the figure:
The closest solution to view_init is setting ax.dist directly. According to the docs for get_proj "dist is the distance of the eye viewing point from the object point". The initial value is currently hardcoded with dist = 10. Lower values (above 0!) will result in a zoomed in plot.
Note: This behavior is not really documented and may change. Changing the limits of the axes to plot only the relevant parts is probably a better solution in most cases. You could use ax.autoscale(tight=True) to do this conveniently.
Working IPython/Jupyter example:
%matplotlib inline
from IPython.display import display
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import axes3d
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111, projection='3d')
# Grab some test data.
X, Y, Z = axes3d.get_test_data(0.05)
# Plot a basic wireframe.
ax.view_init(90, 0)
ax.plot_wireframe(X, Y, Z, rstride=10, cstride=10)
plt.close()
from ipywidgets import interact
#interact(dist=(1, 20, 1))
def update(dist=10):
ax.dist = dist
display(fig)
Output
dist = 10
dist = 5
Whenever (at least) 2 people try to generate a contour plot in my application, at least one of them will receive a random error depending on how far the first person managed to draw.. ("unknown element o", "ContourSet must be in current Axes" are just two of the possibilities)
The following is a cut down test that can produce the error, if you try to load this page in 2 or more tabs at once, the first will render correctly whilst the second will produce an error. (Easiest way I found to do this was to click the refresh page button in chrome with the middle mouse button a couple times)
views.py
def home(request):
return render(request, 'home.html', {'chart': _test_chart()})
def _test_chart():
import base64
import cStringIO
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('agg')
from matplotlib.mlab import bivariate_normal
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
from numpy.core.multiarray import arange
delta = 0.5
x = arange(-3.0, 4.001, delta)
y = arange(-4.0, 3.001, delta)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)
Z1 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
Z2 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.5, 0.5, 1, 1)
Z = (Z1 - Z2) * 10
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.contour(X, Y, Z, 10, colors='k')
jpg_image_buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
fig.savefig(jpg_image_buffer)
array = base64.b64encode(jpg_image_buffer.getvalue())
jpg_image_buffer.close()
return array
home.html (just this one line is enough)
<img src="data:image/png;base64,{{ chart }}" />
I've tried using mpld3 instead to handle the generation of the image and this still produces different errors so I know its definitely not the saving of the figure but more its generation. I've also tried using a ThreadPool and Threading to no avail, from what I can tell it seems like creating a contour plot in matplotlib cannot support multiple instances which will never work for a website...
My only clear solution I can think of right now is to replace matplotlib with something else which I really don't want to do.
Is there a way to generate contour plots with matplotlib that will work for me?
First, let me start by saying that this is much more easy to reproduce by calling _test_chart in a couple threads
from threading import Thread
for i in xrange(2):
Thread(target=_test_chart).start()
Doing the above, one will work as desired whilst the second one will crash.
The simple reason for this is that the pyplot module is not designed for multithreading and therefore the two charts are getting their data mixed up as they attempt to draw.
This can be better explained by mdboom
...pyplot is used for convenient plotting at the commandline and keeps around global state. For example, when you say plt.figure() it adds the figure to a global list and then sets the "current figure" pointer to the most recently created figure. Then subsequent plotting commands automatically write to that figure. Obviously, that's not threadsafe...
There are two ways to fix this issue,
Force these charts to be drawn in different processes.
for i in xrange(2):
pool = Pool(processes=1)
pool.apply(_test_chart)
Whilst this will work you will find that there is a noticable drop in performance since it will often take just as long to create the process as it will to generate the chart (which I didn't think was acceptable!)
The real solution is to use the OO interface modules of Matplotlib which will then allow you to work with the correct objects - essentially this works down to working with subplots rather than plots. For the given example in the question, this would look like the following
def _test_chart2():
delta = 0.5
x = arange(-3.0, 4.001, delta)
y = arange(-4.0, 3.001, delta)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, y)
Z1 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.0, 1.0, 0.0, 0.0)
Z2 = bivariate_normal(X, Y, 1.5, 0.5, 1, 1)
Z = (Z1 - Z2) * 10
fig = figure(figsize=(10, 5))
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(111)
extents = [x.min(), x.max(), y.min(), y.max()]
im = ax1.imshow(Z,
interpolation='spline36',
extent=extents,
origin='lower',
aspect='auto',
cmap=cm.jet)
ax1.contour(X, Y, Z, 10, colors='k')
jpg_image_buffer = cStringIO.StringIO()
fig.savefig(jpg_image_buffer)
array = base64.b64encode(jpg_image_buffer.getvalue())
jpg_image_buffer.close()
return array
I've been having an issue with saving matplotlib graphs as images.
The images are saving differently from what shows up when I call the .show() method on the graph.
An example is here:
http://s1.postimg.org/lbyei5cfz/blue5.png
I'm not sure what else to do. I've spent the past hours trying to figure out what's causing it, but I can't figure it out.
Here is my code in it's entirety.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import random
turn = 1 #for the x values
class Graph():
def __init__(self, name, color):
self.currentValue = 5 #for the y values
self.x = [turn]
self.y = [self.currentValue]
self.name = name
self.color = color
def update(self):
if random.randint(0,1): #just to show if the graph's value goes up or down
self.currentValue += random.randint(0,10)
self.y.append(self.currentValue)
else:
self.currentValue -= random.randint(0,10)
self.y.append(self.currentValue)
self.x.append(turn)
def plot(self):
lines = plt.plot(self.x,self.y)
plt.setp(lines, 'color',self.color)
plt.savefig(self.name + str(turn))
#plt.show() will have a different result from plt.savefig(args)
graphs = [Graph("red",'r'),Graph("blue",'b'),Graph("green",'g')]
for i in range(5):
for i in graphs:
i.update() #changes the x and y value
i.plot() #saves the picture of the graph
turn += 1
Sorry if this is a stupid mistake I'm making, I just find it peculiar how plt.show() and plt.savefig are different.
Thanks for the help.
As stated correctly by David, plt.show() resets current figure. plt.savefig(), however, does not, so you need to reset it explicitly. plt.clf() or plt.figure() are two functions that can do it dor you. Just insert the call right after plt.savefig:
plt.savefig(self.name + str(turn))
plt.clf()
If you want to save the figure after displaying it, you'll need to hold on to the figure instance. The reason that plt.savefig doesn't work after calling show is that the current figure has been reset.
pyplot keeps track of which figures, axes, etc are "current" (i.e. have not yet been displayed with show) behind-the-scenes. gcf and gca get the current figure and current axes instances, respectively. plt.savefig (and essentially any other pyplot method) just does plt.gcf().savefig(...). In other words, get the current figure instance and call its savefig method. Similarly plt.plot basically does plt.gca().plot(...).
After show is called, the list of "current" figures and axes is empty.
In general, you're better off directly using the figure and axes instances to plot/save/show/etc, rather than using plt.plot, etc, to implicitly get the current figure/axes and plot on it. There's nothing wrong with using pyplot for everything (especially interactively), but it makes it easier to shoot yourself in the foot.
Use pyplot for plt.show() and to generate a figure and an axes object(s), but then use the figure or axes methods directly. (e.g. ax.plot(x, y) instead of plt.plot(x, y), etc) The main advantage of this is that it's explicit. You know what objects you're plotting on, and don't have to reason about what the pyplot state-machine does (though it's not that hard to understand the state-machine interface, either).
As an example of the "recommended" way of doing things, do something like:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = np.linspace(-1, 1, 100)
y = x**2
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)
fig.savefig('fig1.pdf')
plt.show()
fig.savefig('fig2.pdf')
If you'd rather use the pyplot interface for everything, then just grab the figure instance before you call show. For example:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = np.linspace(-1, 1, 100)
y = x**2
plt.plot(x, y)
fig = plt.gcf()
fig.savefig('fig1.pdf')
plt.show()
fig.savefig('fig2.pdf')
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