# Simple Plotting in Python with matplotlib¶

If while reading this you have any questions about what certain words are defined as see this computer programming dictionary forum, which you can view here.

## Plotting with matplotlib¶

matplotlib is a 2D plotting library that is relatively easy to use to produce publication-quality plots in Python. It provides an interface that is easy to get started with as a beginner, but it also allows you to customize almost every part of a plot. matplotlib's gallery provides a good overview of the wide array of graphics matplotlib is capable of creating. We'll just scratch the surface of matplotlib's capabilities here by looking at making some line plots.

This first line tells the Jupyter Notebook interface to set up plots to be displayed inline (as opposed to opening plots in a separate window). This is only needed for the notebook.

In [1]:
%matplotlib inline


The first step is to import the NumPy library, which we will import as np to give us less to type. This library provides an array object we can use to perform mathematics operations, as well as easy ways to make such arrays. We use the linspace function to create an array of 10 values in x, spanning between 0 and 5. We then set y equal to x * x.

In [2]:
import numpy as np

x = np.linspace(0, 5, 10)
y = x * x


Now we want to make a quick plot of these x and y values; for this we'll use matplotlib. First, we import the matplotlib.pyplot module, which provides a simple plotting interface; we import this as plt, again to save typing.

matplotlib has two main top-level plotting objects: Figure and Axes. A Figure represents a single figure for plotting (a single image or figure window), which contains one or more Axes objects. An Axes groups together an x and y axis, and contains all of the various plotting methods that one would want to use.

Below, we use the subplots() function, with no parameters, to quickly create a Figure, fig, and an Axes, ax, for us to plot on. We then use ax.plot(x, y) to create a line plot on the Axes we created; this command uses pairs of values from the x and y arrays to create points defining the line.

In [3]:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)

Out[3]:
[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x10a6823c8>]

Matplotlib provides a wide array of ways to control the appearance of the plot. Below we adjust the line so that it is a thicker, red dashed line. By specifying the marker argument, we tell matplotlib to add a marker at each point; in this case, that marker is a square (s). For more information on linestyles, markers, etc., type help(ax.plot) in a cell, or see the matplotlib plot docs.

In [4]:
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y, color='red', linestyle='--', linewidth=2, marker='s')

Out[4]:
[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x10a6e10b8>]

## Controlling Other Plot Aspects¶

In addition to controlling the look of the line, matplotlib provides many other features for cutomizing the look of the plot. In our plot, below we:

• Set labels for the x and y axes
• Add a title to the plot
In [5]:
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y, color='red')
ax.grid()
ax.set_xlabel('x')
ax.set_ylabel('y')
ax.set_title('f(x) = x * x')

Out[5]:
<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x10bd9c7b8>

matplotlib also has support for LaTeX-like typesetting of mathematical expressions, called mathtext. This is enabled by surrounding math expressions by $ symbols. Below, we replace the x * x in the title, with the more expressive$x^2$. In [6]: fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.plot(x, y, color='red') ax.grid() ax.set_xlabel('x') ax.set_ylabel('y') ax.set_title('$f(x) = x^2$')  Out[6]: <matplotlib.text.Text at 0x10be93f98> ## Multiple Plots¶ Often, what we really want is to make multiple plots. This can be accomplished in two ways: • Plot multiple lines on a single Axes • Combine multiple Axes in a single Figure First, let's look at plotting multiple lines. This is really simple--just call plot on the Axes you want multiple times: In [7]: fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.plot(x, x, color='green') ax.plot(x, x * x, color='red') ax.plot(x, x**3, color='blue')  Out[7]: [<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x10f64d630>] Of course, in this plot it isn't clear what each line represents. We can add a legend to clarify the picture; to make it easy for matplotlib to create the legend for us, we can label each plot as we make it: In [8]: fig, ax = plt.subplots() ax.plot(x, x, color='green', label='$x$') ax.plot(x, x * x, color='red', label='$x^2$') ax.plot(x, x**3, color='blue', label='$x^3\$')
ax.legend(loc='upper left')

Out[8]:
<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10f682668>

Another option for looking at multiple plots is to use multiple Axes; this is accomplished by passing our desired layout to subplots(). The simplest way is to just give it the number of rows and columns; in this case the axes are returned as a two dimensional array of Axes instances with shape (rows, columns).

In [9]:
# Sharex tells subplots that all the plots should share the same x-limit, ticks, etc.
# It also eliminates the redundant labelling
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, sharex=True)

axes[0, 0].plot(x, x)
axes[0, 0].set_title('Linear')

axes[0, 1].plot(x, x * x)
axes[0, 1].set_title('Squared')

axes[1, 0].plot(x, x ** 3)
axes[1, 0].set_title('Cubic')

axes[1, 1].plot(x, x ** 4)
axes[1, 1].set_title('Quartic')

Out[9]:
<matplotlib.text.Text at 0x10ff62358>

Of course, that's a little verbose for my liking, not to mention tedious to update if we want to add more labels. So we can also use a loop to plot:

In [10]:
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=2, sharex=True)

titles = ['Linear', 'Squared', 'Cubic', 'Quartic']
y_vals = [x, x * x, x**3, x**4]

# axes.flat returns the set of axes as a flat (1D) array instead
# of the two-dimensional version we used earlier
for ax, title, y in zip(axes.flat, titles, y_vals):
ax.plot(x, y)
ax.set_title(title)
ax.grid(True)


This makes it easy to tweak all of the plots with a consistent style without repeating ourselves. It's also then easier to add, or remove plots and reshape. If you're not familiar with the zip() function below, it's Python's way of iterating (looping) over multiple lists of things together; so each time through the loop the first, second, etc. items from each of the lists is returned. It's one of the built-in parts of Python that makes it so easy to use.