9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

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Data Visualisation with Matplotlib

How to master the basic key features of Matplotlib in 5 mins

June Tao Ching Follow

Sep 19 · 4 min read

Photo by Isaac Smith on Unsplash

Matplotlib is one of the famous library to visualise data in Python. In this article, I will
go through these key functions that I think is useful and important so that those who are
new to Matplotlib can quickly pick it up.
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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

Basic Charting

Generate Mathematical Expression in title and label

Annotate your chart with text and arrows

Highlight your chart

Getting Started
As usual, we would need to install matplotlib package if we do not have it.

pip install matplotlib

Let’s import the package that we need in this tutorial.

Basic Charting

gure1.png

Let’s start with basic charting function in Matplotlib.

plt.title will create a title for your chart. It accepts normal string and Tex markup. If
you wish to use Tex markup to generate mathematical expression, you have to use $ to
enclose your text string. I prefer to use this because it looks way better than sin(x/2) !

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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

Here are some other examples of mathematical expression we can use in Matplotlib. You
may refer to the documentation for more examples.

plt.plot will generate a plot with the given data points, x and np.sin(x) are the data
points that we input at this case. By default, plt.plot will return a solid line style ( - ).
You may select other line style such as dashed line or dotted line.

Line Styles

We can customise the colour of the plot with color parameter. You can pass in colour
string or colour code. Same as title, you can pass in mathematical expression to label of
the plot too. plt.legend will create legend for the chart based on the attributes you have
passed in plot .

plt.grid will create a grid on a chart. Similar to the plot , you can define different line

style. alpha is the opacity of the grid.

plt.xlabel and plt.ylabel are used to label x-axis and y-axis.

plt.savefig is used if you want to save this chart as an image. If you never specify the
full path, the image will be saved in the same folder of your script by default.

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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

plt.show is used to display the chart when you are using terminal or script. It is
unnecessary in some IDE and Jupyter notebook.

Annotate Your Chart

gure2.png

I have used plt.figure(figsize=(10,10)) to enlarge the size of the chart so that we can
have a clearer look on the annotations. You may pass in the width and heigh to figsize

for your desired chart size.

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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

plt.annotate is used to annotate the intersection points of 2 lines. xy is the location of

annotation point while xytext is the location of the annotation text. I have demonstrate
3 types of arrow with different colour and size, you may refer to the documentation for
more options.

Highlight Your Chart

gure3.png

plt.axvspan is used to highlight along the x-axis while plt.axhspan is used to highlight
along the y-axis. We can define different colour with facecolor parameter and different
opacity with alpha .

Customise xtick in bar chart

Bar chart is also another commonly used chart in visualisation, let’s look into it too.

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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

gure4.png

plt.bar taking an array for your coordinate of the bar. If you wish to create a multiple
bar chart, you have to pass in the coordinate of both bars. x — width/2 and x + width/2

are passed into it to create a multiple bars chart.

plt.xtick is used to update the label to days ( ['Mon','Tue','Wed','Thu','Fri'] )

because it is [0,1,2,3,4] by default. We can add rotation to this label as well if the text
is too long. At this case, a 30 degree rotation is added to the tick.

Now you have learnt how to customise your charts with Matplotlib, I hope this article
will help you pick up the basic of Matplotlib and get familiar with other Matplotlib
functions with ease. Do drop me a comment if I made any mistakes or typos.

You can view the complete Jupyter notebook in my Github. Cheers!

. . .

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9/20/2020 Data Visualisation with Matplotlib | by June Tao Ching | Sep, 2020 | Towards Data Science

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