Data visualization
Part I
In this lecture
We will learn how to create basic plots using matplotlib library
• Scatter plot
• Histogram
• Bar plot
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Data Visualization
• Data visualization allows us to quickly interpret the data
and adjust different variables to see their effect
• Technology is increasingly making it easier for us to do so
Why visualize data?
o Observe the patterns
o Identify extreme values that could be anomalies
o Easy interpretation
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Popular plotting libraries in Python
Python offers multiple graphing libraries that offers diverse
features
• matplotlib • to create 2D graphs and plots
• pandas visualization • easy to use interface, built on
Matplotlib
• seaborn • provides a high-level interface
for drawing attractive and
informative statistical graphics
• ggplot • based on R’s ggplot2, uses
Grammar of Graphics
• plotly • can create interactive plots
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Matplotlib
• Matplotlib is a 2D plotting library which
produces good quality figures
• Although it has its origins in emulating the
MATLAB graphics commands, it is independent
of MATLAB
• It makes heavy use of NumPy and other
extension code to provide good performance
even for large arrays
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Scatter plot
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Scatter Plot
What is a scatter plot?
• A scatter plot is a set of points that represents
the values obtained for two different variables
plotted on a horizontal and vertical axes
When to use scatter plots?
• Scatter plots are used to convey the relationship
between two numerical variables
• Scatter plots are sometimes called correlation
plots because they show how two variables are
correlated
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Importing data into Spyder
Importing necessary libraries
‘pandas’ library to work with dataframes
‘numpy’ library to do numerical operations
‘matplotlib’ library to do visualization
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Importing data into Spyder
Importing data
Removing missing values from the dataframe
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Scatter plot
x y
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Scatter plot
The price of the car decreases as age of the car increases
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Histogram
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Histogram
What is a histogram?
• It is a graphical representation of data using
bars of different heights
• Histogram groups numbers into ranges and
the height of each bar depicts the frequency
of each range or bin
When to use histograms?
• To represent the frequency distribution of
numerical variables
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Histogram
x
Histogram with default arguments
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Histogram
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Histogram
Frequency distribution of kilometre of the cars shows that
most of the cars have travelled between 50000 – 100000 km
and there are only few cars with more distance travelled
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Bar plot
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Bar plot
What is a bar plot?
• A bar plot is a plot that presents categorical
data with rectangular bars with lengths
proportional to the counts that they
represent
When to use bar plot?
• To represent the frequency distribution of
categorical variables
• A bar diagram makes it easy to compare sets
of data between different groups
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Bar plot
x height of the bars
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Bar plot
Frequency distribution of fuel type
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Bar plot
x height of the bars
Set the labels of the xticks
Set the location of the xticks
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Bar plot
Bar plot of fuel type shows that most of the cars have petrol as
fuel type
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Summary
We have learnt how to create basic plots using matplotlib library
• Scatter plot
• Histogram
• Bar plot
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THANK YOU
