Scientific Plotting in Python - python

I have a large data set of tuples containing (time of event, latitude, longitude) that I need to visualize. I was hoping to generate a 'movie'-like xy-plot, but was wondering if anyone has a better idea or if there is an easy way to do this in Python?
Thanks in advance for the help,
--Leo

get matplotlib

The easiest option is matplotlib. Two particular solutions that might work for you are:
1) You can generate a series of plots, each a snapshot at a given time. These can either be displayed as a dynamic plot in matplotlib, where the axes stay the same and the data moves around; or you can save the series of plots to separate files and later combine them to make a movie (using a separate application). There a number of examples in the official examples for doing these things.
2) A simple scatter plot, where the colors of the circles changes with time might work well for your data. This is super easy. See this, for example, which produces this figure
alt text http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/plot_directive/mpl_examples/pylab_examples/ellipse_collection.hires.png

I'd try rpy. All the power of R, from within python.
http://rpy.sourceforge.net/
rpy is awesome.
Check out the CRAN library for animations,
http://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/animation/index.html
Of course, you have to learn a bit about R to do this, but if you're planning to do this kind of thing routinely in future it will be well worth your while to learn.

If you are interested in scientific plotting using Python then have a look at Mlab: http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/docs/development/html/mayavi/mlab.html
It allows you to plot 2d / 3d and animate your data and the quality of the charts is really high.

Enthought's Chaco is designed for interactive/updating plots. the api and such takes a little while to get use to, but once you're there it's a fantastic framework to work with.

I have had reasonable success with Python applications generating SVG with animation features embedded, but this was with a smaller set of elements than what you probably have. For example, if your data is about a seismic event, show a circle that shows up when the event happened and grows in size matching the magnitude of the event. A moving indicator over a timeline is really simple to add.
Kaleidoscope (Opera, others maybe, Safari not) shows lots of pieces moving around and I found inspirational. Lots of other good SVG tutorial content on the site too.

You might want to look at PyQwt. It's a plotting library which works with Qt/PyQt.
Several of the PyQwt examples (in the qt4examples directory) show how to create "moving" / dynamically changing plots -- look at CPUplot.py, MapDemo.py, DataDemo.py.

Related

Software or python package to draw and plot simple objects in 3D?

I am looking for a software package, or even better, a python package that allows me to draw objects by inputing parameters, for example: I want a circle at position x,y, radius r, thickness t, color c and then look at it at different angles.
I know that I could use stuff like blender, but I feel that this is overkill and it would take a long time to learn it sufficiently.
I just need this to do some ncie looking plots in my thesis.
thx.
I would recommend OpenSCad. It is a software to create 3D objects by writing code. Although it isn't a python package, it is quite lightweight, has a nice view and the commands are really easy to learn - take a look at their Cheat Sheet. The projects can be shared as text files or exported in various 3D formats, to get a prettier view from other software.
And I you want to do the same but stick with Python you can combine OpenSCAD with SolidPython.

Plotting distribution from sampled data in python

I have two sets of sampled points in 2d space[x ,y], each set represents one class. When I plot all points, it's mess and one can't see anything on it. I need somehow plot distribution of each set (if it's possible on same canvas with different colours, then better). Does anybody know about some good library for it?
Matplotlib is a very good library for that task. You can plot histograms, scatter plots and lot of other things. You just have to know what you want and then you can probably do it with that. I use that for similar tasks a lot.
[UPDATE]
As I said, you can do that with matplotlib. Here is an example from their gallery: http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/scatter_hist.html
It's not so pretty as with the answer in the comment of #lejlot, but still correct.

How to draw a graph that can indicate the values when the mouse moves to some part of the graph in python and put it on the web page?

I'm writing a web interface for a database of genes values of some experiments with CGI in Python and I want to draw a graph for the data queried. I'm using matplotlib.pyplot, draw a graph, save it, and perform it on the web page. But usually there are many experiments queried hence there are a lot of values. Sometimes I want to know which experiment does one value belong to because it's a big value, whereas it's hard to identify because the picture is small in size. The names of the experiments are long strings so that it will mess the x axis if I put all the experiment names on the x axis.
So I wonder if there is a way to draw a graph that can interact with users, i.e. if I point my mouse to some part on the graph, there would be one small window appears and tells me the exact value and what is the experiment name here. And the most important is, I can use this function when I put the graph on the web page.
Thank you.
What you want is basically D3.js rendering of your plots. As far as I know, there are currently three great ways of achieving this, all under rapid development:
MPLD3 for creating graphs with Matplotlib and serving them as interactive web graphics (see examples in Jake's blog post).
Plotly where you can either generate the plots directly via Plotly or from Matplotlib figures (e.g. using matplotlylib) and have them served by Plotly.
Bokeh if you do not mind moving away from Matplotlib.

Plot functions in Python

I am required to use Python for engineering project. Need to create many graphs, including surface plots. In the past I used Matlab for plotting and really liked it. I was wandering if there is a module/package/extension which bring similar capability into Python.
To be more specific, I need piloting for 2 different reasons.
To understand how functions behave. Something quick and dirty would do it.
Publication/presentation. Ability to add labels, legend, grid, customise colour, axis properties etc.
Try matplotlib, it's pretty extensive and has a shell similar to MATLAB / Mathematica.
I suspect matplotlib.pyplot would be right up your alley.

Barchart (o plot) 3D in Python

I need to plot some data in various forms. Currently I'm using Matplotlib and I'm fairly happy with the plots I'm able to produce.
This question is on how to plot the last one. The data is similar to the "distance table", like this (just bigger, my table is 128x128 and still have 3 or more number per element).
Now, my data is much better "structured" than a distance table (my data doesn't varies "randomly" like in a alphabetically sorted distance table), thus a 3D barchart, or maybe 3 of them, would be perfect. My understanding is that such a chart is missing in Matplotlib.
I could use a (colored) Countor3d like these or something in 2D like imshow, but it isn't really well representative of what the data is (the data has meaning just in my 128 points, there isn't anything between two points). And the height of bars is more readable than color, IMO.
Thus the questions:
is it possible to create 3D barchart in Matplotlib? It should be clear that I mean with a 2D domain, not just a 2D barchart with a "fake" 3D rendering for aesthetics purposes
if the answer to the previous question is no, then is there some other library able to do that? I strongly prefer something Python-based, but I'm OK with other Linux-friendly possibilities
if the answer to the previous question is no, then do you have any suggestions on how to show that data? E.g. create a table with the values, superimposed to the imshow or other colored way?
For some time now, matplotlib had no 3D support, but it has been added back recently. You will need to use the svn version, since no release has been made since, and the documentation is a little sparse (see examples/mplot3d/demo.py). I don't know if mplot3d supports real 3D bar charts, but one of the demos looks a little like it could be extended to something like that.
Edit: The source code for the demo is in the examples but for some reason the result is not. I mean the test_polys function, and here's how it looks like:
example figure http://www.iki.fi/jks/tmp/poly3d.png
The test_bar2D function would be even better, but it's commented out in the demo as it causes an error with the current svn version. Might be some trivial problem, or something that's harder to fix.
MyavaVi2 can make 3D barcharts (scroll down a bit). Once you have MayaVi/VTK/ETS/etc. installed it all works beautifully, but it can be some work getting it all installed. Ubuntu has all of it packaged, but they're the only Linux distribution I know that does.
One more possibility is Gnuplot, which can draw some kind of pseudo 3D bar charts, and gnuplot.py allows interfacing to Gnuplot from Python. I have not tried it myself, though.
This is my code for a simple Bar-3d using matplotlib.
import mpl_toolkits
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
%matplotlib inline
## The value you want to plot
zval=[0.020752244,0.078514652,0.170302899,0.29543857,0.45358061,0.021255922,0.079022499,\
0.171294169,0.29749654,0.457114286,0.020009631,0.073154019,0.158043498,0.273889264,0.419618287]
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12,9))
ax = fig.add_subplot(111,projection='3d')
col=["#ccebc5","#b3cde3","#fbb4ae"]*5
xpos=[1,2,3]*5
ypos=range(1,6,1)*5
zpos=[0]*15
dx=[0.4]*15
dy=[0.5]*15
dz=zval
for i in range(0,15,1):
ax.bar3d(ypos[i], xpos[i], zpos[i], dx[i], dy[i], dz[i],
color=col[i],alpha=0.75)
ax.view_init(azim=120)
plt.show()
http://i8.tietuku.com/ea79b55837914ab2.png
You might check out Chart Director:
http://www.advsofteng.com
It has a pretty wide variety of charts and graphs and has a nice Python (and several other languages) API.
There are two editions: The free version puts a blurb on the generated image, and the
pay version is pretty reasonably priced.
Here's one of the more interesting looking 3d stacked bar charts:
(source: advsofteng.com)

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