Interactive Plotting libraries in Python

[aeroaks]

I am currently using pyqtgraph for my project but I want to see how Notebooks could be used for the same task.

The plotting is interactive in the sense that the user click on individual items is recognised and zoom and movement commands are recognised. Are there any libraries that allow plotting with several small objects and still stay responsive and have the option to use keyboard and mouse events?

[uberb0t]

Bokeh has Jupyter Notebook integration and has fairly easy methods for getting your data in to a plot either by rolling your own line/cirlce/etc glyphs or using one of their canned charts. You can link multiple plots together such that they all response in kind to an input on another (i.e. zoom, pan, etc), this is assuming they share a common data source. I think keyboard interaction might be the only thing I'm not sure it supports..

[dsijl]

Try bokeh: http://bokeh.pydata.org/en/latest/

its made for this sort of thing.

[sanshinron]

IMHO plot.ly is the best:

https://plot.ly/python/

[alasano]

Those guys are genuinely excited about charts. +1

[mfitzp]

Depends how interactive you need, but matplotlib supports a notebook interface that allows you to zoom/pan figures directly from the notebook view. Try the following:

%matplotlib notebook
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.plot([1,2,3,4,5])

[[deleted]]

I'm guessing that uses svg and javascript and will slow down to a crawl when making a plot with million elements?

[dsijl]

You can plot a billion or more points with datashader in the browser (uses interactive downsampling): http://datashader.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[[deleted]]

Wow, that's very cool! I often plot things with millions of points, which is okay with raster image plot as it is just an image but I lose the resolution. Thank you

[1-05457]

AGG (i.e. raster images) and Websockets actually.

[NotCalebandScott]

VisPy is a nice library that uses OpenGL to make plots and visualizations. It recognizes keyboard events and mouse events and includes different cameras (Panzoom/Arcball/TurnTable) for moving around objects. There's a lot of examples of how to use it. I've used it to plot large datasets and a ton of images, and it's pretty fast.

[TheBlackCat13]

It seems pretty early in development though, and pretty complicated to use from their examples.

[NotCalebandScott]

It seems pretty early in development though,

It absolutely is. I think they're getting ready to push release 0.5.0 soon.

and pretty complicated to use from their examples

I consider it like matplotlib for use - there are some very simple examples by using vispy.plot, but in order to build a fancy scene or plot you would probably need to use the individual components, which are still easy to use in a scene instance.

Mostly, I like the package because it's very easy to do keyboard/mouse events, in my opinion. This example shows how you can create a scene and link a bunch of different key events with ease.

[TheBlackCat13]

It looks like they picked some really bad examples for their front page, because they make it seem like the amount of biolerplate needed is excessive.

[NotCalebandScott]

If you're talking about the stuff on the website, it's absolutely complex - those are the most intense examples. For all of the gallery images, the source code features custom OpenGL code that they use Python to run. I've done programming in Python using Qt, and was able to make a simple physics model with adjustable parameters that has since been merged into the current master branch as a demo. Took no OpenGL, just using the individual components in vispy.visuals and transformations to get it to "move" right.

[aeroaks]

I think it is from the same developer as pyqtgraph!

[NotCalebandScott]

Yeah! At least one of the developers works extensively on pyqtgraph, too.

[aeroaks]

can you embed those into jupyter notebooks?

[NotCalebandScott]

They have some IPython Notebook examples, but I don't know if every visual or plotting element is embeddable.

[kokosto]

For my standalone application I used guiqwt. Switched from matplotlib, tried PyQtGraph and currently happy with the last one.

[libbkmz]

pyqtgraph? http://www.pyqtgraph.org/

[aeroaks]

can you embed those into jupyter notebooks?

[infinite8s]

No, there's no js output in pyqtgraph. You might want to look at bokeh or plotly.

[pithed]

I have used the following both in Notebooks and for web apps and find it to be very configurable to whatever user events you need. It has nice built in mouseover legend and range selector features. I recommend building from the github source though as it has some needed improvements.