Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python • Hacker News Board

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#11

Post by nmca » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:05 PM UTC

mxwsn wrote: post #10

nmca wrote: post #3

Altair is incredible until you realise your plots are bigger than your data. It's annoying, but overall still very good.

Can you speak more about this? Are you saying that Altair's speed scales poorly with dataset size?

It throws an error if you try to plot more than 5000 datapoints by default, internally altair produces a JSON representation (vega-lite) that is larger than the data you plot (because it contains the data you plot, plus formatting information). If you save this output, for example in an ipython notebook, it gets phat pretty quickly.

Altair is still great though, but this issue makes it occasionally annoying.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#12

Post by rocqua » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:10 PM UTC

One question:

Does it work in jupyter notebooks/labs?

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#13

Post by cuchoi » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:12 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #12

One question: Does it work in jupyter notebooks/labs?

Yes! Forgot to mention that... https://altair-viz.github.io/getting_started/installation.ht...

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#14

Post by tomrod » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:20 PM UTC

I'm looking for an interactive visualization tool that I could have site visitors access via a github blog page. Does Altair manage client-side processing? I'm still pretty new in the search but like Altair's adoption of Vega-lite.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#15

Post by sacheendra » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:22 PM UTC

I'm partial to plotnine (https://github.com/has2k1/plotnine). It is an implementation of grammar of graphics in python (like ggplot2).

It provides a stateless layer like interface which feels intuitive, and avoids bugs due to global state.

But, it is built on top of matplotlib. So, if plotnine cannot do something, you can go back to the matplotlib way of doing things and take advantage of the large number of blogs, example, tutorials, and stackoverflow answers.

Performance wise, it can handle more data than altair. But less than matplotlib, if you use the built in data manipulation features.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#16

Post by jhbadger » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:23 PM UTC

airstrike wrote: post #4

Pretty cool. > Sadly, in Python, we do not have a ggplot2. I've got to ask, though: why is that the case?

I'm not sure it is. I'm more of an R guy, but when I do use python I use plotnine[1], which is very ggplot2-like.

[1] https://plotnine.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#17

Post by pj_mukh » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:24 PM UTC

How is Altair on 3D data? I see no examples of this. Matplotlib is decent here (apart from all the same disadvantages the author lays out), but the default options look kinda fugly.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#18

Post by herdrick » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #17

How is Altair on 3D data? I see no examples of this. Matplotlib is decent here (apart from all the same disadvantages the author lays out), but the default options look kinda fugly.

The article says it doesn't support 3d.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#19

Post by nsriv » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:26 PM UTC

pj_mukh wrote: post #17

How is Altair on 3D data? I see no examples of this. Matplotlib is decent here (apart from all the same disadvantages the author lays out), but the default options look kinda fugly.

In the article it says Altair does not do 3D plotting, if that was your question.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#20

Post by F_J_H » Mon, May 06, 2019, 10:27 PM UTC

tomrod wrote: post #14

I'm looking for an interactive visualization tool that I could have site visitors access via a github blog page. Does Altair manage client-side processing? I'm still pretty new in the search but like Altair's adoption of Vega-lite.

Plotly plots saved as html?