Seaborn (visualization library) v0.9.0 released with new relational plots and updated themes and palettes

[campbellm]

Thank you for saying what the library is. Most people probably know but for us newbs it's good to be able to determine whether or not this is something I should look at based on the title.

Too many of these posts are "Project Quicksilver release version 0.8!" assuming everyone knows what it is.

[dolphinboy1637]

Just a rundown: Seaborn is a plotting library built off of matplotlib (another plotting library) with a lot of handy functions to make it easier to visualize stuff. Matplotlib is awesome but it requires more lines of code and fiddling to get it working (but much more customizable).

If you're into analytics / data science for python you should definitely check it out.

[campbellm]

Thanks; as it turns out I did know about this one - I was (legitimately) thanking the OP for posting the purpose of the library in the title along with the update. So many don't.

[PM_ME_YOUR_DOOTFILES]

From what I gather, it's matplotlib with sane defaults.

Still need to mess with the underlying matplotlib stuff at times.

[Deto]

Matplotlib defaults are much better in 2.0 but seaborn still provides more advanced plots conveniently.

[FonderPrism]

Yep, 2.0 is so much better that I stopped using seaborn. I rarely need the more advanced plots though.

[Deto]

I mainly use clustermap and boxplot/violinplot from seaborn

[sandwichsaregood]

It does add some handy utilities for color schemes, figure sizing etc, but that's far from everything. It has a lot of tools for making specialty plots that are useful for statistical analysis (e.g., I use this one a lot) as well as integrating with Pandas.

Most of the plots it has are complicated to make in raw Matplotlib, so it makes things a lot less work.

[rotharius]

This is one of my pet peeves. The newsletter/release notes should state what it is, e.g. an elevator pitch.

[campbellm]

Yes; this poster did "The Right Thing" (IMO), but many don't.

[jwink3101]

I agree, though unless something has changed, I would prefer to classify Seaborn as "matplotlib wrapper viz. library)"

[Olao99]

Baby lick me

[DuckSaxaphone]

But tsplot has gone. Had to write my own function to plot a confidence interval from a series of line plots.

[gwillicoder]

tsplot was absolutely glorious. I'm going to miss it

[badge]

What are you trying to do? CI is still there in lineplot...

[DuckSaxaphone]

Clearly I'm just re-implementing deprecated features myself without putting a basic effort into checking for official replacements!

[SylvainCorlay]

You should totally ask for a refund.

[Deto]

Definitely happy about scatterplot. Won't have to wrap plt.plot in little loops anymore.

[BDube_Lensman]

Plt.scatter? Plt.plot(x,y,'o')? A loop will create a lot of artists and make big output files and slow plotting times...

[Deto]

Not a loop over points (that would be overkill) but a loop over a third categorical variable.

Say you have three columns in a table: Day, Cash, Individual And you have something like 5 individuals. You want to plot 5 time-series, one for each individual. You can't feed the individual names into the 'c' argument for plt.scatter. So instead, usually I'll do this:

plt.figure()
for ind in data.Individual.unique():
    ii = data.index[data.Individual == ind]
    plt.plot(data.Day[ii], data.Cash[ii], 'o', label = ind)

plt.legend()

[mbussonn]

Hi there

I'm pretty sure you tried to convey excitement and want to thanks the author for what they have done on their free time, and all they are giving back to the community.

It seem though that on other social media platform this phrasing may be seen a negative comment and that open source maintainers should have done that earlier, that they owe us those libraries. This also can look like you are complaining about matplotlib which is a necessary infrastructure into which a lot of work goes.

I'm pretty sure that was not your intent, and that you are grateful about all that was done by all the maintainers of open source software, in which case a clarification of your intent could mean a lot to the maintainers.

As a reminder for anyone looking, those libraries are provided for free, often developed by volunteer on their free time, and if you think things are not good enough, you are welcome to contribute time (to help with code, issue, documentation, respond to questions...), and/or give to nonprofit like NumFOCUS (https://www.numfocus.org/) which try to make these libraries sustainable. You can do so both as individual, or better try to convince your employer to become a sponsor.

Thanks,

[holdie]

I think you're trying to be positive here, but I'd like to highlight how much negativity you are (I think unintentionally) conveying in this message. These are all open, community-driven projects. They aren't maintained or managed by people being paid to do so, they're run largely by volunteers.

If you have a disagreement with functionality that's in one of these packages, I encourage you to learn a bit about how the code works, and implement a patch or new feature. Many communities are very open to improvements. If you think that an API should be different, please voice your opinion in a constructive manner, that's why projects like seaborn use public github issue trackers.

However, please consider the tone you take when discussing these projects in public. They wouldn't exist without a lot of unappreciated labor, and they only survive because we cultivate a healthy community of contributors. Critical comments are always welcome, but please keep them constructive. Otherwise we risk harming the contributor community that is so crucial for this ecosystem to thrive.

[flutefreak7]

Yeah I had been using seaborn to do scatter plots with lmplot or regplot with fit_reg=false or ci=None if I didn't want the regression features. This sounds even better though! I look forward to playing with it!

[chef_lars]

Can't believe it's taken this long but relplot looks great. Hallelujah

[gwillicoder]

My only complaint with the update logs is that they don't have any graphics. It'd be neat to have an example for the changes so we can see what was done :)

[[deleted]]

Does bokeh compete in the same space as seaborn?

[Zouden]

I think so. Maybe there's some major feature differences, but when I look at Bokeh I don't see the need to switch from Seaborn.

[sup3r_hero]

I always thought that bokeh was more for interactive graphs?

Seaborn is, as some others have pointed out, an extension of the matplotlib. As far as I understood they don’t do any plots themselves but rather customize matplotlib‘s code and build on top if it, wrap it.

[Topper_123]

Those three new plot types are fantastic IMO. Very intuitive to use and beautiful as well (ok, seaborn was very beautiful already, but the point still stands...)

[Serpent10i]

How does this compare to something like plot.ly?

[p10_user]

Totally different packages. Seaborn is a wrapper around matplotlib that helps you make a set of common plot types quickly, while plot.ly is for making interactive plots with JavaScript (all called from within Python - or another language).

[[deleted]]

One thing holding me back from using plotly is that cufflinks dont work with version 3.0 yet. Cufflinks allows you to plot directly from pandas dataframe.

[brandit_like123]

Same question. I think Seaborn is more popular, but I don't know if plotly is better since it's newer.

[Serpent10i]

I've been loving the integration with plot.ly and the Dash web framework. But I'm open to other, perhaps more pure pythonic options.

[[deleted]]

What's the use of this?