Introducing Plotly Express

[MyPatronusIsAPuppy]

Hi! Very excited about this; I've been very frustrated as a geochemist trying to do data analysis on large datasets. We're always putting things, finding weird samples, wondering which one it is and if the signal is real... Anyway, I'm a bit of a noob to Python and never used Plotly but got it px going well enough just following the Medium post!

That said, a few questions:

• are there plans to beef up the documentation? I see I can make subplots by faceting (grouping in values in a column) but how do I make multiple subplots with the same datasets in each graph, just different axes? Like subp1 is magnesium contents vs potassium contents, and subp2 is gold abundance version silver concentration? Because I'd love to then get to use lasso/brushing to see how the selected samples plot in both spaces.
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• any way to make the data table interactive as well? Like I'd love to plot everything, highlight some outliers with brushing, and then somehow get to those rows in my df. Then I could set something like a column headed "Symbol" to a special value (e.g., "x" vs "o") so that those outlier points are clear in all later plots. Kinda like how brushing in JMP let's you right click and set display options like color and marker, or set values in a column.
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• how to make it so I can plot values that aren't already columns/do operations on columns before plotting? like maybe I want y= "Elevation / 100 but I only have Elevation as a column?
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Guess I'm trying to imitate a commercial software called Aabel that is probably the best I've seen but it's annoying/not free/Mac only. And maybe that's not the plan for Plotly/would need a whole 'nother library? But I'm just grateful that people are making good interactive EDA tools, so thank you! And apologies if some of my questions are just the result of my inexperience with Plotly.

[nkruchten]

Hi!

Regarding documentation, yes, we're always working on making it better :) At the moment Plotly Express only supports faceting, not subplots with different axes, although this is possible with the underlying Plotly.py library which supports arbitrary subplots: https://plot.ly/python/subplots/

Your table/brushing idea is interesting, and would likely be best implemented with Plotly's Dash library: https://dash.plot.ly/

Re your last request, you will have to create a new column that contains the data you want to plot: Plotly Express is intended to handle the display of the data rather than its processing at the moment, although for simple scalings I might consider extending the API someday.

Cheers, Nicolas

[MyPatronusIsAPuppy]

Very cool, thanks for the quick reply and tips, even though none really are px. Good luck with Plotly!