Related
I have some code which produces a 3D scatter plot using matplotlib's scatter in conjunction with tight_layout, see the simplified code below:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import proj3d
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
N = 100
x = np.random.random(N)
y = np.random.random(N)
z = np.random.random(N)
ax.scatter(x, y, z)
plt.tight_layout() # <-- Without this, everything is fine
plt.savefig('scatter.png')
In matplotlib 2.2.3 this makes a figure like so:
Similar output is generated by older versions, at least back to 1.5.1. When using the new version 3.0.0, something goes wrong at plt.tight_layout() and I get the following output:
Accompanying this is the warning
.../matplotlib/tight_layout.py:177: UserWarning: The left and right margins cannot be made large enough to accommodate all axes decorations
One may argue that using tight_layout with no arguments as here does not (on older matplotlibs) consistently lead to the expected tightened margins anyway, and so one should refrain from using tight_layout with 3D plots in the first place. However, by manually tweaking the arguments to tight_layout it is (used to be) a decent way to trim the margins even on 3D plots.
My guess is that this is a bug in matplotlib, but maybe they've made some deliberate change I havn't picked up on. Any pointers about a fix is appreciated.
Thanks to the comment by ImportanceOfBeingErnest, it now works:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import proj3d
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.gca(projection='3d')
N = 100
x = np.random.random(N)
y = np.random.random(N)
z = np.random.random(N)
ax.scatter(x, y, z)
# The fix
for spine in ax.spines.values():
spine.set_visible(False)
plt.tight_layout()
plt.savefig('scatter.png')
From the links in the comment, it seems that this will be fixed in matplotlib 3.0.x. For now, the above may be used.
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()
Right below your main body code of plotting.
I want to use MatPlotLib to plot a graph, where the plot changes over time. At every time step, an additional data point will be added to the plot. However, there should only be one graph displayed, whose appearance evolves over time.
In my test example, the plot is a simple linear plot (y = x). Here is what I have tried:
for i in range(100):
x = range(i)
y = range(i)
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.ion()
plt.show()
time.sleep(1)
However, what happens here is that multiple windows are created, so that by the end of the loop I have 100 windows. Also, I have noticed that for the most recent window, it is just a white window, and the plot only appears on the next step.
So, my two questions are:
1) How can I change my code so that only a single window is displayed, whose contents changes over time?
2) How can I change my code so that for the most recent timestep, the plot is actually displayed on the window, rather than it only displaying a white window?
Thanks!
(1)
You can set plt.ion() at the beginning and plot all graphs to the same window. Within the loop use plt.draw() to show the graph and plt.pause(t) to make a pause. Note that t can be very small, but the command needs to be there for the animation to work on most backends.
You might want to clear the axes before plotting new content using plt.gca().cla().
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.ion()
for i in range(100):
x = range(i)
y = range(i)
# plt.gca().cla() # optionally clear axes
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.title(str(i))
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.1)
plt.show(block=True) # block=True lets the window stay open at the end of the animation.
Alternatively to this very simple approach, use any of the examples for animations provided in http://matplotlib.org/examples/animation/index.html
(2)
In order to get each plot in a new window, use plt.figure() and remove plt.ion(). Also only show the windows at the end:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
for i in range(100):
x = range(i)
y = range(i)
plt.figure()
plt.plot(x, y)
plt.title(str(i))
plt.show()
Note that you might find that in both cases the first plot is empty simply because for i=0, range(i) == [] is an empty list without any points. Even for i=1 there is only one point being plotted, but of course no line can connect a single point with itself.
I think the best way is to create one line plot and then update data in it. Then you will have single window and single graph that will continuously update.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.ion()
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(16,8))
axes = fig.add_subplot(111)
data_plot=plt.plot(0,0)
line, = axes.plot([],[])
for i in range(100):
x = range(i)
y = range(i)
line.set_ydata(y)
line.set_xdata(x)
if len(y)>0:
axes.set_ylim(min(y),max(y)+1) # +1 to avoid singular transformation warning
axes.set_xlim(min(x),max(x)+1)
plt.title(str(i))
plt.draw()
plt.pause(0.1)
plt.show(block=True)
My program shows the correct graph in the plt.show() pop up but not in the fig.savefig one. I'm quite new to python so apologies if it is something simple.
I'm using python 2.7.10, windows (10).
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = np.genfromtxt('strike_details.txt') #, skip_header= 0
header= 3
information=10000
width = 5
files = 16
types = 4
length = information + header
frames = data[header:length,0]
fig= plt.figure()
plt.grid(True)
for i in range(0,int(files)):
density=data[(header+i*length):(length+i*length),4]
plt.plot(frames,density, label=data[i*length+1][2])
for j in range (0,files/types):
if i==(types*(j+1)-1):
plt.legend(loc='best')
plt.xlabel('$Frames$', fontsize=22)
plt.ylabel('$Density$', fontsize=22)
fig.savefig(str(data[j*length+1][0])+'_'+str(data[j*length+1][1])+'_'+str(data[j*length+1][2])+'.png',format='png', dpi=fig.dpi)
plt.show()
plt.clf()
The program produces four files with different file names but they're all of the first group you see in the plt.show pop up.
If I missed out anything important let me know.
Thanks,
Lio
I think this is due to mixing the API-style and interactive-styles of matplotlib. When you call plt.show() the link between the active figure and fig is broken, and so you continue to output the first figure you created. I can reproduce this problem with this minimal example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.figure()
for n in range(0,10):
plt.plot(list(range(0,n)))
fig.savefig('test%d.png' % n)
plt.show()
plt.clf()
If you remove the show() the issue goes away.
The correct way to do this is to access the current interactive figure via plt.gcf():
plt.gcf().savefig(...)
Alternatively, you can workaround it by recreating the figure object on each loop:
for i in range(0,int(files)):
fig= plt.figure()
plt.grid(True)
...
My code is something (roughly) like this:
UPDATE: I've redone this with some actual mock-up code that reflects my general problem. Also, realized that the colorbar creation is in the actual loop as otherwise there's nothing to map it to. Sorry for the code before, typed it up in frantic desperation at the very end of the workday :).
import numpy
import matplotlib as mplot
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import os
#make some mock data
x = np.linspace(1,2, 100)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, x)
Z = plt.mlab.bivariate_normal(X,Y,1,1,0,0)
fig = plt.figure()
ax = plt.axes()
'''
Do some figure-related stuff that take up a lot of time,
I want to avoid having to do them in the loop over and over again.
They hinge on the presence of fig so I can't make
new figure to save each time or something, I'd have to do
them all over again.
'''
for i in range(1,1000):
plotted = plt.plot(X,Y,Z)
cbar = plt.colorbar(ax=ax, orientation = 'horizontal')
plt.savefig(os.path.expanduser(os.path.join('~/', str(i))))
plt.draw()
mplot.figure.Figure.delaxes(fig, fig.axes[1]) #deletes but whitespace remains
'''
Here I need something to remove the colorbar otherwise
I end up with +1 colorbar on my plot at every iteration.
I've tried various things to remove it BUT it keeps adding whitespace instead
so doesn't actually fix anything.
'''
Has anyone come across this problem before and managed to fix it? Hopefully this is enough
for an idea of the problem, I can post more code if needed but thought it'd be less of a clutter if I just give an overview example.
Thanks.
colorbar() allows you explicitly set which axis to render into - you can use this to ensure that they always appear in the same place, and not steal any space from another axis. Furthermore, you could reset the .mappable attribute of an existing colorbar, rather than redefine it each time.
Example with explicit axes:
x = np.linspace(1,2, 100)
X, Y = np.meshgrid(x, x)
Z = plt.mlab.bivariate_normal(X,Y,1,1,0,0)
fig = plt.figure()
ax1 = fig.add_axes([0.1,0.1,0.8,0.7])
ax2 = fig.add_axes([0.1,0.85,0.8,0.05])
...
for i in range(1,5):
plotted = ax1.pcolor(X,Y,Z)
cbar = plt.colorbar(mappable=plotted, cax=ax2, orientation = 'horizontal')
#note "cax" instead of "ax"
plt.savefig(os.path.expanduser(os.path.join('~/', str(i))))
plt.draw()
I had a very similar problem, which I finally managed to solve by defining a colorbar axes in a similar fashion to:
Multiple imshow-subplots, each with colorbar
The advantage compared to mdurant's answer is that it saves defining the axes location manually.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import IPython.display as display
from mpl_toolkits.axes_grid1 import make_axes_locatable
from pylab import *
%matplotlib inline
def plot_res(ax,cax):
plotted=ax.imshow(rand(10, 10))
cbar=plt.colorbar(mappable=plotted,cax=cax)
fig, axarr = plt.subplots(2, 2)
cax1 = make_axes_locatable(axarr[0,0]).append_axes("right", size="10%", pad=0.05)
cax2 = make_axes_locatable(axarr[0,1]).append_axes("right", size="10%", pad=0.05)
cax3 = make_axes_locatable(axarr[1,0]).append_axes("right", size="10%", pad=0.05)
cax4 = make_axes_locatable(axarr[1,1]).append_axes("right", size="10%", pad=0.05)
# plt.subplots_adjust(left=0, bottom=0, right=1, top=1, wspace=0.3, hspace=0.3)
N=10
for j in range(N):
plot_res(axarr[0,0],cax1)
plot_res(axarr[0,1],cax2)
plot_res(axarr[1,0],cax3)
plot_res(axarr[1,1],cax4)
display.clear_output(wait=True)
display.display(plt.gcf())
display.clear_output(wait=True)
I'm currently evaluating different python plotting libraries. Right now I'm trying matplotlib and I'm quite disappointed with the performance. The following example is modified from SciPy examples and gives me only ~ 8 frames per second!
Any ways of speeding this up or should I pick a different plotting library?
from pylab import *
import time
ion()
fig = figure()
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(611)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(612)
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(613)
ax4 = fig.add_subplot(614)
ax5 = fig.add_subplot(615)
ax6 = fig.add_subplot(616)
x = arange(0,2*pi,0.01)
y = sin(x)
line1, = ax1.plot(x, y, 'r-')
line2, = ax2.plot(x, y, 'g-')
line3, = ax3.plot(x, y, 'y-')
line4, = ax4.plot(x, y, 'm-')
line5, = ax5.plot(x, y, 'k-')
line6, = ax6.plot(x, y, 'p-')
# turn off interactive plotting - speeds things up by 1 Frame / second
plt.ioff()
tstart = time.time() # for profiling
for i in arange(1, 200):
line1.set_ydata(sin(x+i/10.0)) # update the data
line2.set_ydata(sin(2*x+i/10.0))
line3.set_ydata(sin(3*x+i/10.0))
line4.set_ydata(sin(4*x+i/10.0))
line5.set_ydata(sin(5*x+i/10.0))
line6.set_ydata(sin(6*x+i/10.0))
draw() # redraw the canvas
print 'FPS:' , 200/(time.time()-tstart)
First off, (though this won't change the performance at all) consider cleaning up your code, similar to this:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import time
x = np.arange(0, 2*np.pi, 0.01)
y = np.sin(x)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=6)
styles = ['r-', 'g-', 'y-', 'm-', 'k-', 'c-']
lines = [ax.plot(x, y, style)[0] for ax, style in zip(axes, styles)]
fig.show()
tstart = time.time()
for i in xrange(1, 20):
for j, line in enumerate(lines, start=1):
line.set_ydata(np.sin(j*x + i/10.0))
fig.canvas.draw()
print 'FPS:' , 20/(time.time()-tstart)
With the above example, I get around 10fps.
Just a quick note, depending on your exact use case, matplotlib may not be a great choice. It's oriented towards publication-quality figures, not real-time display.
However, there are a lot of things you can do to speed this example up.
There are two main reasons why this is as slow as it is.
1) Calling fig.canvas.draw() redraws everything. It's your bottleneck. In your case, you don't need to re-draw things like the axes boundaries, tick labels, etc.
2) In your case, there are a lot of subplots with a lot of tick labels. These take a long time to draw.
Both these can be fixed by using blitting.
To do blitting efficiently, you'll have to use backend-specific code. In practice, if you're really worried about smooth animations, you're usually embedding matplotlib plots in some sort of gui toolkit, anyway, so this isn't much of an issue.
However, without knowing a bit more about what you're doing, I can't help you there.
Nonetheless, there is a gui-neutral way of doing it that is still reasonably fast.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import time
x = np.arange(0, 2*np.pi, 0.1)
y = np.sin(x)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=6)
fig.show()
# We need to draw the canvas before we start animating...
fig.canvas.draw()
styles = ['r-', 'g-', 'y-', 'm-', 'k-', 'c-']
def plot(ax, style):
return ax.plot(x, y, style, animated=True)[0]
lines = [plot(ax, style) for ax, style in zip(axes, styles)]
# Let's capture the background of the figure
backgrounds = [fig.canvas.copy_from_bbox(ax.bbox) for ax in axes]
tstart = time.time()
for i in xrange(1, 2000):
items = enumerate(zip(lines, axes, backgrounds), start=1)
for j, (line, ax, background) in items:
fig.canvas.restore_region(background)
line.set_ydata(np.sin(j*x + i/10.0))
ax.draw_artist(line)
fig.canvas.blit(ax.bbox)
print 'FPS:' , 2000/(time.time()-tstart)
This gives me ~200fps.
To make this a bit more convenient, there's an animations module in recent versions of matplotlib.
As an example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.animation as animation
import numpy as np
x = np.arange(0, 2*np.pi, 0.1)
y = np.sin(x)
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=6)
styles = ['r-', 'g-', 'y-', 'm-', 'k-', 'c-']
def plot(ax, style):
return ax.plot(x, y, style, animated=True)[0]
lines = [plot(ax, style) for ax, style in zip(axes, styles)]
def animate(i):
for j, line in enumerate(lines, start=1):
line.set_ydata(np.sin(j*x + i/10.0))
return lines
# We'd normally specify a reasonable "interval" here...
ani = animation.FuncAnimation(fig, animate, xrange(1, 200),
interval=0, blit=True)
plt.show()
Matplotlib makes great publication-quality graphics, but is not very well optimized for speed.
There are a variety of python plotting packages that are designed with speed in mind:
http://vispy.org
http://pyqtgraph.org/
http://docs.enthought.com/chaco/
http://pyqwt.sourceforge.net/
[ edit: pyqwt is no longer maintained; the previous maintainer is recommending pyqtgraph ]
http://code.google.com/p/guiqwt/
To start, Joe Kington's answer provides very good advice using a gui-neutral approach, and you should definitely take his advice (especially about Blitting) and put it into practice. More info on this approach, read the Matplotlib Cookbook
However, the non-GUI-neutral (GUI-biased?) approach is key to speeding up the plotting. In other words, the backend is extremely important to plot speed.
Put these two lines before you import anything else from matplotlib:
import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('GTKAgg')
Of course, there are various options to use instead of GTKAgg, but according to the cookbook mentioned before, this was the fastest. See the link about backends for more options.
For the first solution proposed by Joe Kington ( .copy_from_bbox & .draw_artist & canvas.blit), I had to capture the backgrounds after the fig.canvas.draw() line, otherwise the background had no effect and I got the same result as you mentioned. If you put it after the fig.show() it still does not work as proposed by Michael Browne.
So just put the background line after the canvas.draw():
[...]
fig.show()
# We need to draw the canvas before we start animating...
fig.canvas.draw()
# Let's capture the background of the figure
backgrounds = [fig.canvas.copy_from_bbox(ax.bbox) for ax in axes]
This may not apply to many of you, but I'm usually operating my computers under Linux, so by default I save my matplotlib plots as PNG and SVG. This works fine under Linux but is unbearably slow on my Windows 7 installations [MiKTeX under Python(x,y) or Anaconda], so I've taken to adding this code, and things work fine over there again:
import platform # Don't save as SVG if running under Windows.
#
# Plot code goes here.
#
fig.savefig('figure_name.png', dpi = 200)
if platform.system() != 'Windows':
# In my installations of Windows 7, it takes an inordinate amount of time to save
# graphs as .svg files, so on that platform I've disabled the call that does so.
# The first run of a script is still a little slow while everything is loaded in,
# but execution times of subsequent runs are improved immensely.
fig.savefig('figure_name.svg')