Scholars and journalists have had mixed responses to The Seven Basic Plots. Some have celebrated the book's audacity and breadth. Some have celebrated the book's audacity and breadth. The author and essayist Fay Weldon, for example, wrote the following (which is quoted on the front cover of the book): 'This is the most extraordinary. Examples: King Arthur, Cinderella, Aladdin. As with many of the basic plots, there are variations on Rags to Riches that are less upbeat. Variation 1: Failure. What Booker calls the “dark” version of this story is when the hero fails to win in the end, usually because he sought wealth and status for selfish reasons.

Step into 2021 with powerful Data Visualization Libraries with our book - Data Visualization in Python.

✅ 30-day no-question money-back guarantee
✅ Beginner to Advanced
✅ Updated regularly (latest update in January 2021)
✅ Contains FREE Supplemental Guide

Introduction

Matplotlib is one of the most widely used data visualization libraries in Python. From simple to complex visualizations, it's the go-to library for most.

In this tutorial, we'll take a look at how to plot a scatter plot in Matplotlib.

Import Data

We'll be using the Ames Housing dataset and visualizing correlations between features from it.

Let's import Pandas and load in the dataset:

Plot a Scatter Plot in Matplotlib

Now, with the dataset loaded, let's import Matplotlib, decide on the features we want to visualize, and construct a scatter plot:

Box And Whisker Plot Examples

Here, we've created a plot, using the PyPlot instance, and set the figure size. Using the returned Axes object, which is returned from the subplots() function, we've called the scatter() function.

We need to supply the x and y arguments as the features we'd like to use to populate the plot. Running this code results in:

We've also set the x and y labels to indicate what the variables represent. There's a clear positive correlation between these two variables. The more area there is above ground-level, the higher the price of the house was.

There are a few outliers, but the vast majority follows this hypothesis.

Plotting Multiple Scatter Plots in Matplotlib

If you'd like to compare more than one variable against another, such as - check the correlation between the overall quality of the house against the sale price, as well as the area above ground level - there's no need to make a 3D plot for this.

While 2D plots that visualize correlations between more than two variables exist, some of them aren't fully beginner friendly.

An easy way to do this is to plot two plots - in one, we'll plot the area above ground level against the sale price, in the other, we'll plot the overall quality against the sale price.

Let's take a look at how to do that:

Here, we've called plt.subplots(), passing 2 to indicate that we'd like to instantiate two subplots in the figure.

We can access these via the Axes instance - ax. ax[0] refers to the first subplot's axes, while ax[1] refers to the second subplot's axes.

Here, we've called the scatter() function on each of them, providing them with labels. Running this code results in:

Plotting a 3D Scatter Plot in Matplotlib

If you don't want to visualize this in two separate subplots, you can plot the correlation between these variables in 3D. Matplotlib has built-in 3D plotting functionality, so doing this is a breeze.

First, we'll need to import the Axes3D class from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d. This special type of Axes is needed for 3D visualizations. With it, we can pass in another argument - z, which is the third feature we'd like to visualize.

Let's go ahead and import the Axes3D object and plot a scatter plot against the previous three features:

Running this code results in an interactive 3D visualization that we can pan and inspect in three-dimensional space:

Plots Examples

Customizing Scatter Plot in Matplotlib

You can change how the plot looks like by supplying the scatter() function with additional arguments, such as color, alpha, etc:

Scatter Plots Examples

Running this code would result in:

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we've gone over several ways to plot a scatter plot using Matplotlib and Python.

R Plots Examples

If you're interested in Data Visualization and don't know where to start, make sure to check out our book on Data Visualization in Python.

What Does Plot Mean In A Story

Data Visualization in Python, a book for beginner to intermediate Python developers, will guide you through simple data manipulation with Pandas, cover core plotting libraries like Matplotlib and Seaborn, and show you how to take advantage of declarative and experimental libraries like Altair.