Python Visualization

Liana Harutyunyan
Programming for Data Science
April 2, 2024
American University of Armenia
liana.harutyunyan@aua.am

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Main graph types

• lineplot
• scatterplot
• barplot
• histogram
• boxplot
• piechart

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Plotting libraries

• Matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
• Seaborn
import seaborn as sns

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Lineplot

A Line chart is a graph that represents information as a

series of data points connected by a straight line. In line
charts, each data point or marker is plotted and connected
with a line or curve.

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Lineplot

Read yield data.csv data.

• defines x-axis as index (1, 2, 3, ..., length):

plt.plot(data["yield apples"])

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Lineplot

Read yield data.csv data.

• defines x-axis as index (1, 2, 3, ..., length):

plt.plot(data["yield apples"])

• give the x argument as well (not to have the indices as

x):

plt.plot(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

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Lineplots with labels

• Add labels by xlabel and ylabel.

It is always important to write what each axis
represents and have titles as well, so that the
reader can understand without looking at code.

plt.plot(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

plt.xlabel("Years")

plt.ylabel("Yield of Apples")

plt.title("Yield of apples over the years")

plt.show()

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Lineplot - multiple lines

• For two lines on the same graph, you just need two
plt.plots so that these are collected together and
pictured in one graph.

plt.plot(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

plt.plot(data["years"], data["yield oranges"])

• You also need to have one plt.show() after the plot

functions.
• Note that to have label for each lineplot, we need to
specify label argument for each. We also need
plt.legend() before plt.show() to show the legend.

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Lineplot

To show each data in the lineplot, we can use different

markers.
Example: marker=’o’, marker=’x’ - highlights the points with
different markers.

• Many different marker shapes like a circle, cross,

square, etc. are provided by Matplotlib.

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Figures

Before defining plot details, you can use the plt.figure

function to change the size of the figure.

plt.figure(figsize=(12, 6))

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Barplot

• When you have categorical data, you can represent it

with a bar graph.
• A bar graph plots data with the help of bars, which
represent value on the y-axis and category on the x-axis.
• Bar graphs use bars with varying heights to show the
data which belongs to a specific category.

plt.bar(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

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Plot Zoom-in

You can also zoom in to the graph using plt.xlim for

zoom-in in x-axis, and plt.ylim for zoom-in in y-axis.
Example:

plt.bar(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

plt.ylim(0.8, 1)

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Barplot

We can also stack bars on top of each other. Let’s plot the
data for apples and oranges.

plt.bar(data["years"], data["yield apples"])

plt.bar(data["years"], data["yield oranges"],

bottom=data["yield apples"])

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Histograms

• A Histogram is a bar representation of data that varies

over a range.
• It plots the height of the data belonging to a range along
the y-axis and the range along the x-axis.

plt.hist(data["yield apples"])
• It has bins parameter, that controls the number of bins
the data is represented.

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Scatterplots

Scatter plots are used when we have to plot two continuous

variables present at different coordinates.

plt.scatter(data["yield apples"], data["yield oranges"])

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Boxplots

A boxplot is a standardized way of displaying the

distribution of data, that includes quantiles, median,
minimum and maximum.

plt.boxplot(data["yield apples"])

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Seaborn

An easy way to make your charts look beautiful is to use

some default styles from the Seaborn library.
Example - put sns.set style("darkgrid") before your
plotting code.
There are five preset seaborn themes: darkgrid, whitegrid,
dark, white, and ticks.

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Seaborn

Seaborn is like an alternative for the matplotlob library, that

has a bit different syntax, and nicer plots (of course this is
subjective).
The syntax is also similar to R’s plotting library ggplot syntax.

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Seaborn alternatives

The common syntax is

sns.chart name(data = data, x = ”column 1”, y = ”column 2”)

• lineplot - sns.lineplot

sns.lineplot(x = ”years”, y = ”yield apples”, data = data)

sns.lineplot(x = ”years”, y = ”yield oranges”, data = data)

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Seaborn alternatives - Barplot

Seaborn has different datasets for examples.

Let’s load ”tips” dataset:
tips df = sns.load dataset("tips")
With similar syntax, for barplot:

sns.barplot(x=’day’, y=’total bill’, data=tips df)

The values are averaged by ”day” attribute.

Let’s do the yield data example as well.

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Seaborn alternatives - Barplot

If you want to compare bar plots side-by-side, you can use

the hue argument. The comparison will be done based on
the third feature specified in this argument.

sns.barplot(x=’day’, y=’total bill’, hue=’sex’,

data=tips df)

What will happen if we interchange the x and y?

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Seaborn alternatives - Histograms

Import seaborn’s iris dataset.

flowers df = sns.load dataset("iris")

sns.histplot(flowers df, x="sepal length")

Exercises:

• Add ”hue” attribute as type of flower.

• Alpha parameter gives transperancy, if we have
intersections.

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Seaborn alternatives - Scatterplots

Similarly, we have sns.scatterplot() function.

Exercise: Plot sepal length VS sepal width scatterplot. Add
color based on the type of flower.

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Seaborn - titles

For seaborn titles, we write:

sns.chart type(...).set(title="", xlabel="",
ylabel="")

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Summary

Reading
https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/python-tutorial/data-
visualization-in-python

References
https://www.simplilearn.com/tutorials/python-tutorial/data-
visualization-in-python

Questions?

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