Tutorial: Plotting with matplotlib

This tutorial will give you an introductory tutorial to plotting data with matplotlib.



In [1]:

    
%matplotlib inline

To import the pyplot library of the matplotlib simply do:



In [2]:

    
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

Plot in canvas with the plot command:



In [3]:

    
plt.plot([1,2,3],[4,5,1])









    Out[3]:





[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x106d75c90>]

The above simply makes the canvas (in this tutorial since the matplotlib is loaded inline the plot is produced, while in a script the plot is not yet shown). To show the plotted canvas simply ask pyplot to show the plot:



In [5]:

    
plt.show()

Title and labels

To set labels ask plt to modify the title, xlabel and ylabel:



In [7]:

    
plt.title("Info");
plt.xlabel("X");
plt.ylabel("Y");

Styles

To use styles import the styles library of pyplot



In [9]:

    
from matplotlib import style

and to use it



In [10]:

    
style.use("ggplot")



In [11]:

    
plt.plot([1,2,3],[4,5,1])









    Out[11]:





[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x1070b4090>]

One can also play around with the arguments of the plot command. For example:



In [12]:

    
plt.plot([1,2,3],[4,5,1], linewidth=5)









    Out[12]:





[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x1071aa7d0>]

Plot two lines and label them in the legend and also make a grid:



In [13]:

    
x = [5,8,10];
y = [12,16,6];
x2 = [6,9,11];
y2 = [6,15,7];



In [15]:

    
plt.plot(x,y,'g',label='line one', linewidth=5); # a green line of width 5 called line one
plt.plot(x2,y2,'c',label='line one', linewidth=5); # a cyan line of width 5 called line two
plt.title("Info");
plt.xlabel("X"); 
plt.xlabel("Y");

plt.legend(); ## to make the legend USE THIS AFTER THE PLOT LINES

plt.grid(True, color='k');
plt.show()



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