bqplot

What is it?

bqplot is a plotting system for the Jupyter notebook.

Goals

• provide a unified framework for 2d visualizations with a pythonic API.
• provide a sensible API for adding user interactions (panning, zooming, selection, etc)
• pip installable

Two APIs are provided

• Users can build a custom visualization using our object model, that is inspired by the constructs of the Grammar of Graphics (figure, marks, axes, scales), and enrich their visualization with our Interaction Layer.
• Or they can use the context-based API similar to Matplotlib's pyplot, which provides sensible default choices for most parameters.

Getting Started

Dependencies

This package depends on the following packages:

• numpy
• ipywidgets (version >=4.0)

Installation

1. Installing bqplot:

   $ pip install bqplot
   

   or for a development installation,

   $ git clone https://github.com/bloomberg/bqplot.git
   $ cd bqplot
   $ pip install -e .
   $ bower install
   

2. Next, we need to install the JavaScript code.

   • Linux users:

   $ python -m bqplot.install --symlink --user --force
   

   • Windows users:

   $ python -m bqplot.install --user --force
   

3. Note for developers: the --symlink argument in Linux allows one to modify the JavaScript code in-place. This feature is not available with Windows.

Loading bqplot

# In a Jupyter notebook
import bqplot

That's it! You're ready to go!

Examples

Using the pyplot API

from bqplot import pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.figure(1)
np.random.seed(0)
n = 200
x = np.linspace(0.0, 10.0, n)
y = np.cumsum(np.random.randn(n))
plt.plot(x,y, axes_options={'y': {'grid_lines': 'dashed'}})
plt.show()

Using the bqplot internal object model

import numpy as np
from IPython.display import display
import bqplot as bq

size = 20
np.random.seed(0)

x_data = np.arange(size)

x_ord = bq.OrdinalScale()
y_sc = bq.LinearScale()

bar = bq.Bars(x=x_data, y=np.random.randn(2, size), scales={'x': x_ord, 'y': y_sc},
           type='stacked')
line = bq.Lines(x=x_data, y=np.random.randn(size), scales={'x': x_ord, 'y': y_sc},
             stroke_width=3, colors=['red'], display_legend=True, labels=['Line chart'])

ax_x = bq.Axis(scale=x_ord)
ax_y = bq.Axis(scale=y_sc, orientation='vertical', tick_format='0.2f', grid_lines='solid')

fig = bq.Figure(marks=[bar, line], axes=[ax_x, ax_y])
display(fig)

License

This software is licensed under the Apache 2.0 license. See the LICENSE file for details.