Tag:plotting - Practical Business Python (original) (raw)
Mon 06 August 2018
New Plot Types in Seaborn’s Latest Release
Seaborn is one of the go-to tools for statistical data visualization in python. It has been actively developed since 2012 and in July 2018, the author released version 0.9. This version of Seaborn has several new plotting features, API changes and documentation updates which combine to enhance an already great library. This article will walk through a few of the highlights and show how to use the new scatter and line plot functions for quickly creating very useful visualizations of data.
Mon 07 May 2018
Building Bullet Graphs and Waterfall Charts with Bokeh
In my last article, I presented a flowchart that can be useful for those trying to select the appropriate python library for a visualization task. Based on some comments from that article, I decided to use Bokeh to createwaterfall charts and bullet graphs. The rest of this article shows how to use Bokeh to create these unique and useful visualizations.
Mon 30 April 2018
Choosing a Python Visualization Tool
This brief article introduces a flowchart that shows how to select a python visualization tool for the job at hand. The criteria for choosing the tools is weighted more towards the “common” tools out there that have been in use for several years. There may be some debate about some of the recommendations but I believe this should be helpful for someone that is new to the python visualization landscape and trying to make a decision about where to invest their time to learn how to use one of these libraries.
Tue 20 February 2018
Intro to pdvega - Plotting for Pandas using Vega-Lite
Jake VanderPlas covered this topic in his PyCon 2017 talk and the landscape has probably gotten even more confusing in the year since this talk was presented.
Jake is also one of the creators of Altair (discussed in this post) and is back with another plotting library called pdvega. This library leverages some of the concepts introduced in Altair but seeks to tackle a smaller subset of visualization problems. This article will go through a couple examples of using pdvega and compare it to the basic capabilities present in pandas today.
Tue 02 January 2018
Interactive Visualization of Australian Wine Ratings
Over on Kaggle, there is an interesting data set of over 130K wine reviewsthat have been scraped and pulled together into a single file. I thought this data set would be really useful for showing how to build an interactive visualization using Bokeh. This article will walk through how to build a Bokeh application that has good examples of many of its features. The app itself is really helpful and I had a lot of fun exploring this data set using the visuals. Additionally, this application shows the power of Bokeh and it should give you some ideas as to how you could use it in your own projects. Let’s get started by exploring the “rich, smokey flavors with a hint of oak, tea and maple” that are embedded in this data set.
Mon 09 October 2017
Creating Interactive Visualizations with Plotly’s Dash Framework
Python’s visualization landscape is quite complex with many available libraries for various types of data visualization. In previous articles, I have covered several approaches for visualizing data in python. These options are great for static data but oftentimes there is a need to create interactive visualizations to more easily explore data. Trying to cobble interactive charts together by hand is possible but certainly not desirable when deployment speed is critical. That’s where Dash comes in.
Dash is an open source framework created by the plotly team that leverages Flask, plotly.js and React.js to build custom data visualization apps. This article is a high level overview of how to get started with dash to build a simple, yet powerful interactive dashboard.
Mon 28 August 2017
Building a Bullet Graph in Python
Lately I have been spending time reading about various visualization techniques with the goal of learning unique ways to display complex data. One of the interesting chart ideas I have seen is the bullet graph. Naturally, I wanted to see if I could create one in python but I could not find any existing implementations. This article will walk through why a bullet graph (aka bullet chart) is useful and how to build one using python and matplotlib.
Tue 23 May 2017
How Accurately Can Prophet Project Website Traffic?
In early March, I published an article introducing prophet which is an open source library released by Facebook that is used to automate the time series forecasting process. As I promised in this article, I’m going to see how well those predictions held up to the real world after 2.5 months of traffic on this site.
Mon 06 March 2017
Forecasting Website Traffic Using Facebook’s Prophet Library
A common business analytics task is trying to forecast the future based on known historical data. Forecasting is a complicated topic and relies on an analyst knowing the ins and outs of the domain as well as knowledge of relatively complex mathematical theories. Because the mathematical concepts can be complex, a lot of business forecasting approaches are “solved” with a little linear regression and “intuition.” More complex models would yield better results but are too difficult to implement.
Given that background, I was very interested to see that Facebook recently open sourced a python and R library called prophet which seeks to automate the forecasting process in a more sophisticated but easily tune-able model. In this article, I’ll introduce prophet and show how to use it to predict the volume of traffic in the next year for Practical Business Python. To make this a little more interesting, I will post the prediction through the end of March so we can take a look at how accurate the forecast is.
Mon 29 August 2016
Introduction to Data Visualization with Altair
Despite being over 1 year old, one of the most popular articles I have written isOverview of Python Visualization Tools. After these many months, it is one of my most frequently searched for, linked to and read article on this site. I think this fact speaks to hunger in the python community for one visualization tool to rise above the rest. I am not sure I want (or need) one to “win” but I do continue to watch the changes in this space with interest.
All of the tools I mentioned in the original article are still alive and many have changed quite a bit over the past year or so. Anyone looking for a visualization tool should investigate the options and see which ones meet their needs. They all have something to offer and different use-cases will drive different solutions.
In the spirit of keeping up with the latest options in this space, I recently heard about Altair which calls itself a “declarative statistical visualization library for Python.” One of the things that peaked my interest was that it is developed by Brian Granger and Jake Vanderplas. Brian is a core developer in the IPython project and very active in the scientific python community. Jake is also active in the scientific python community and has written a soon to be released O’Reilly book called Python Data Science Handbook. Both of these individuals are extremely accomplished and knowledgeable about python and the various tools in the python scientific ecosystem. Because of their backgrounds, I was very curious to see how they approached this problem.