Live data from Hacker News

Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

fernandoi.cl

51–60 of 75 posts

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#52
As part of our work, we create data dashboards. We use NumPy and Pandas to analyze data, either Flask or Django as a framework, and HighCharts for interactive charts. The JS charting library has a variety of charts to meet our needs. Our input stored either as SQL or CSV is dynamic data.

I am beginning to wonder if HighCharts is replaceable with a fully open-source charting library.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#54

I came in here expecting to see one hell of a rationalization for using a 44 year old computer to do visualizations. :)

Haha I came here expecting to see the dude from Assassin's Creed drawing all kinds of graphs :'-) Or better, imagining.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#55

I came in here expecting to see one hell of a rationalization for using a 44 year old computer to do visualizations. :)

Haha I came here expecting to see the dude from Assassin's Creed drawing all kinds of graphs :'-) Or better, imagining.

A literal assassin killing me would be better than working with anything based on matplotlib; fortunately altair does away with it.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#56
Me and my team are big tableau users, so now that we are testing Python vega and altair are the natural approach. I am having my struggles to make altair work on jupyterlab (while ipyvega works so I could start playing), but I think it’s worth the effort. The Altair guys are extremely nice and responsive on github which is great too. For those looking for side projects, I think a nice altair gui that works in jupyterlab would be great. Anyway, why this approach is superior? Because once you get it you’ll be amazed the stuff you can do and how easily, also how easy is to train new analysts on this, this is important and matplotlib falls short. But don’t take my word, grab a trial copy of Tableau and see it for yourself.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#57

As part of our work, we create data dashboards. We use NumPy and Pandas to analyze data, either Flask or Django as a framework, and HighCharts for interactive charts. The JS charting library has a variety of charts to meet our needs. Our input stored either as SQL or CSV is dynamic data. I am beginning to wonder if HighCharts is replaceable with a fully open-source charting library.

Have you checked out the dash library by plotly?

It's pretty awesome and i use it for a similar purpose. MY dashhboards/charts are pretty basic but there seems to be good support for interactivity and callbacks.

https://dash.plot.ly/gallery

https://plot.ly/python/

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#58
post #31

The problem with all these nice new visualization libraries for Python, is that they all (at least the shinny nice ones) fail totally short when it comes to do B&W graphics for journal publications. Things like filling patterns, line patterns etc, are mostly missing. I still use Matplotlib and I can make it look beautiful and exactly how I want... it's just a lot more work to get the shinny bits.

I save the data from python or matlab and use pgfplots to create stunning plots. Nothing I saw in any other plotting lib came ever close to pgfplots in terms of beauty and flexibility.

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#59
post #31

The problem with all these nice new visualization libraries for Python, is that they all (at least the shinny nice ones) fail totally short when it comes to do B&W graphics for journal publications. Things like filling patterns, line patterns etc, are mostly missing. I still use Matplotlib and I can make it look beautiful and exactly how I want... it's just a lot more work to get the shinny bits.

second that. also for the scientific community at large, big portions of "not-so-happy"-matplotlib-users are just using whatever they/their admin installed sometime ago, which probably is outdated and does not include a bunch of features introduced in v3

Re: Using Altair for most of my visualization in Python

#60
> Not great statistical support. I still rely on Seaborn for quick visualization that needs to fit a linear regression.

Why does a plotting library need support for statistical analysis? I always think of manipulating data and visualizing it as orthogonal disciplines.

Post reply on HN