Plotting

Author

Marie-Hélène Burle

It can be convenient to plot directly in the REPL (for instance when using SSH).

using UnicodePlots
histogram(randn(1000), nbins=40)

Precompiling UnicodePlots
  ✓ Crayons
  ✓ MarchingCubes
  ✓ UnicodePlots
  3 dependencies successfully precompiled in 35 seconds. 41 already precompiled.
Precompiling IntervalSetsExt
  ✓ UnicodePlots → IntervalSetsExt
  1 dependency successfully precompiled in 1 seconds. 46 already precompiled.
Precompiling FreeTypeExt
  ✓ UnicodePlots → FreeTypeExt
  1 dependency successfully precompiled in 1 seconds. 53 already precompiled.

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   [-2.8, -2.6) ┤▌ 1                                       
   [-2.6, -2.4) ┤▌ 1                                       
   [-2.4, -2.2) ┤█████▏ 11                                 
   [-2.2, -2.0) ┤██████▊ 15                                
   [-2.0, -1.8) ┤█████▌ 12                                 
   [-1.8, -1.6) ┤█████▏ 11                                 
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   [-1.2, -1.0) ┤█████████████████████████▉ 57             
   [-1.0, -0.8) ┤████████████████████████▎ 53              
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   [-0.4, -0.2) ┤██████████████████████████████▉ 68        
   [-0.2, -0.0) ┤████████████████████████████████▊ 72      
   [-0.0,  0.2) ┤██████████████████████████████▉ 68        
   [ 0.2,  0.4) ┤████████████████████████████████████  79  
   [ 0.4,  0.6) ┤████████████████████████████████▊ 72      
   [ 0.6,  0.8) ┤████████████████████████████▍ 62          
   [ 0.8,  1.0) ┤██████████████████████▍ 49                
   [ 1.0,  1.2) ┤██████████████████▋ 41                    
   [ 1.2,  1.4) ┤██████████████████████▍ 49                
   [ 1.4,  1.6) ┤██████████████▌ 32                        
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   [ 1.8,  2.0) ┤█████▉ 13                                 
   [ 2.0,  2.2) ┤████▌ 10                                  
   [ 2.2,  2.4) ┤██▋ 6                                     
   [ 2.4,  2.6) ┤█▍ 3                                      
   [ 2.6,  2.8) ┤██▋ 6                                     
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   [ 3.0,  3.2) ┤▌ 1                                       
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                                 Frequency

Most of the time however, you will want to make nicer looking graphs. There are many options to plot in Julia.

Plots is a convenient Julia package which allows to use the same code with several graphing backends such as the GR framework (great for speed), Plotly.js (allows interaction with your graphs in a browser), or PyPlot. The default backend is the GR framework.

StatsPlots is an enhanced version with added stats functionality.

Example:

# First run takes time as the package needs to compile
using StatsPlots
StatsPlots.histogram(randn(1000), bins=40)

Precompiling StatsPlots
  ✓ Arpack_jll
  ✓ Distances
  ✓ Widgets
  ✓ Arpack
  ✓ SentinelArrays
  ✓ Distances → DistancesSparseArraysExt
  ✓ TableOperations
  ✓ Distances → DistancesChainRulesCoreExt
  ✓ MultivariateStats
  ✓ NearestNeighbors
  ✓ Clustering
  ✓ StatsPlots
  12 dependencies successfully precompiled in 8 seconds. 225 already precompiled.

Here, we need to explicitly run StatsPlots.histogram rather than histogram to prevent a conflict with the function of the same name from the package UnicodePlots.