Intro to Matplotlib

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intro_to_matplotlib

Skill - Intro to Matplotlib

Table of Contents

Skills Required

Please make sure to have all the skills mentioned above to understand and execute the code mentioned below. Go through the above skills if necessary for reference or revision

In this post we will get a beginner level introduction to Matplotlib library which is extensively **used for plotting** in python

Matplotlib is a plotting library in the scipy ecosystem of libraries.

Installing Matplotlib

  • Open command prompt and type pip install matplotlib
    pip install matplotlib

Anatomy of a matplotlib figure

  • A graph in matplotlib is called a figure. It is like a canvas on which we draw figures.
  • A matplotlib figure can have plot, axis, title, legend, grid, ticks, tick labels, spines
  • The figure below describes all the components of a matplotlib figure.
  • Please take your time to understand the terminology used in matplotlib figure, since these terms will be used in matplotlib functions to control the appearance of a figure.
  • You can refer to this figure any time to recollect the terminology used in matplotlib functions

anatomy of a matplotlib figure

  • As shown above, in order to create a plot with matplotlib, we need to create a figure with axes

Creating a basic line plot with lists of x and y coordinates

Lets create a simple line plot with x and y lists

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# the lists of x and y coordinates
x = [1, 2, 3, 4]
y = [1, 4, 2, 3]

# create a figure and axes handle using 'subplots' function
fig, ax = plt.subplots()

# use axes handle to plot xy data and get the plot artist in return
la, = ax.plot(x, y)

# set the title for our plot using axes handle
ax.set_title('Basic Matplotlib plot')

# set x and y axis titles using axes handle
ax.set_xlabel("X Data")
ax.set_ylabel("Y Data")

# set label to the plot for the sake of legend using the plot artist
la.set_label('basic_plot')

# enable legends for the axes handle
ax.legend()

# print the plot
plt.show()

plot_python_output
Congrats!, we just covered the intro, installation and very basic plotting skills of Matplotlib

I would also like to point out that in the anatomy of figure page, the code with which the diagram is created is mentioned below it. That code is a very useful as a reference for beginners on how to create plots, titles, legends etc

Video

You can the video on this post here

Online Interpreter

Although we recommend to practice the above examples in Visual Studio Code, you can run these examples online at https://pynative.com/online-python-code-editor-to-execute-python-code/

Basic Plot Example

References

Table of Contents

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