Plots in data science play a pivotal role in unraveling complex insights from data. They serve as a bridge between raw numbers and actionable insights, aiding in the understanding and interpretation of datasets. Learn about 33 tools to visualize data with this blog

In this blog post, we will delve into some of the most important plots and concepts that are indispensable for any data scientist.

data science plots — 9 Data Science Plots – Data Science Dojo

1. KS Plot (Kolmogorov-Smirnov Plot):

The KS Plot is a powerful tool for comparing two probability distributions. It measures the maximum vertical distance between the cumulative distribution functions (CDFs) of two datasets. This plot is particularly useful for tasks like hypothesis testing, anomaly detection, and model evaluation.

Suppose you are a data scientist working for an e-commerce company. You want to compare the distribution of purchase amounts for two different marketing campaigns. By using a KS Plot, you can visually assess if there’s a significant difference in the distributions. This insight can guide future marketing strategies.

2. SHAP Plot:

SHAP plots offer an in-depth understanding of the importance of features in a predictive model. They provide a comprehensive view of how each feature contributes to the model’s output for a specific prediction. SHAP values help answer questions like, “Which features influence the prediction the most?”

Imagine you’re working on a loan approval model for a bank. You use a SHAP plot to explain to stakeholders why a certain applicant’s loan was approved or denied. The plot highlights the contribution of each feature (e.g., credit score, income) in the decision, providing transparency and aiding in compliance.

3. QQ plot:

The QQ plot is a visual tool for comparing two probability distributions. It plots the quantiles of the two distributions against each other, helping to assess whether they follow the same distribution. This is especially valuable in identifying deviations from normality.

In a medical study, you want to check if a new drug’s effect on blood pressure follows a normal distribution. Using a QQ Plot, you compare the observed distribution of blood pressure readings post-treatment with an expected normal distribution. This helps in assessing the drug’s effectiveness.

4. Cumulative explained variance plot:

In the context of Principal Component Analysis (PCA), this plot showcases the cumulative proportion of variance explained by each principal component. It aids in understanding how many principal components are required to retain a certain percentage of the total variance in the dataset.

Let’s say you’re working on a face recognition system using PCA. The cumulative explained variance plot helps you decide how many principal components to retain to achieve a desired level of image reconstruction accuracy while minimizing computational resources.

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5. Gini Impurity vs. Entropy:

These plots are critical in the field of decision trees and ensemble learning. They depict the impurity measures at different decision points. Gini impurity is faster to compute, while entropy provides a more balanced split. The choice between the two depends on the specific use case.

Suppose you’re building a decision tree to classify customer feedback as positive or negative. By comparing Gini impurity and entropy at different decision nodes, you can decide which impurity measure leads to a more effective splitting strategy for creating meaningful leaf nodes.

6. Bias-Variance tradeoff:

Understanding the tradeoff between bias and variance is fundamental in machine learning. This concept is often visualized as a curve, showing how the total error of a model is influenced by its bias and variance. Striking the right balance is crucial for building models that generalize well.

Imagine you’re training a model to predict housing prices. If you choose a complex model (e.g., deep neural network) with many parameters, it might overfit the training data (high variance). On the other hand, if you choose a simple model (e.g., linear regression), it might underfit (high bias). Understanding this tradeoff helps in model selection.

7. ROC curve:

The ROC curve is a staple in binary classification tasks. It illustrates the tradeoff between the true positive rate (sensitivity) and false positive rate (1 – specificity) for different threshold values. The area under the ROC curve (AUC-ROC) quantifies the model’s performance.

In a medical context, you’re developing a model to detect a rare disease. The ROC curve helps you choose an appropriate threshold for classifying individuals as positive or negative for the disease. This decision is crucial as false positives and false negatives can have significant consequences.

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8. Precision-Recall curve:

Especially useful when dealing with imbalanced datasets, the precision-recall curve showcases the tradeoff between precision and recall for different threshold values. It provides insights into a model’s performance, particularly in scenarios where false positives are costly.

Let’s say you’re working on a fraud detection system for a bank. In this scenario, correctly identifying fraudulent transactions (high recall) is more critical than minimizing false alarms (low precision). A precision-recall curve helps you find the right balance.

9. Elbow curve:

In unsupervised learning, particularly clustering, the elbow curve aids in determining the optimal number of clusters for a dataset. It plots the variance explained as a function of the number of clusters. The “elbow point” is a good indicator of the ideal cluster count.

You’re tasked with clustering customer data for a marketing campaign. By using an elbow curve, you can determine the optimal number of customer segments. This insight informs personalized marketing strategies and improves customer engagement.

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These plots in data science are the backbone of your data. Incorporating them into your analytical toolkit will empower you to extract meaningful insights, build robust models, and make informed decisions from your data. Remember, visualizations are not just pretty pictures; they are powerful tools for understanding the underlying stories within your data.

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We use plots to understand the distribution and nature of variables in the data and use visualizations to describe our findings in reports or presentations to both colleagues and clients. The importance of plotting in a data scientist’s work cannot be overstated.

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Plotting with Matplotlib

If you have worked on any kind of data analysis problem in Python you will probably have encountered matplotlib, the default (sort of) plotting library. I personally have a love-hate relationship with it — the simplest plots require quite a bit of extra code but the library does offer flexibility once you get used to its quirks. The library is also used by pandas for its built-in plotting feature. So even if you haven’t heard of matplotlib, if you’ve used df.plot(), then you’ve unknowingly used matplotlib.

Plotting with Seaborn

Another popular library is seaborn, which is essentially a high-level wrapper around matplotlib and provides functions for some custom visualizations, these require quite a bit of code to create in the standard matplotlib. Another nice feature seaborn provides is sensible defaults for most options like axis labels, color schemes, and sizes of shapes.

Introducing Plotly

Plotly might sound like the new kid on the block, but in reality, it’s nothing like that. Plotly originally provided functionality in the form of a JavaScript library built on top of D3.js and later branched out into frontends for other languages like R, MATLAB and, of course, Python. plotly.py is the Python interface to the library.

As for usability, in my experience Plotly falls in between matplotlib and seaborn. It provides a lot of the same high-level plots as seaborn but also has extra options right there for you to tweak, such as matplotlib. It also has generally much better defaults than matplotlib.

Plotly’s interactivity

The most fascinating feature of Plotly is the interactivity. Plotly is fundamentally different from both matplotlib and seaborn because plots are rendered as static images by both of them while Plotly uses the full power of JavaScript to provide interactive controls like zooming in and panning out of the visual panel. This functionality can also be extended to create powerful dashboards and responsive visualizations that could convey so much more information than a static picture ever could.

First, let’s see how the three libraries differ in their output and complexity of code. I’ll use common statistical plots as examples.

To have a relatively even playing field, I’ll use the built-in seaborn theme that matplotlib comes with so that we don’t have to deduct points because of the plot’s looks.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6))

for species, species_df in iris.groupby('species'):
    ax.scatter(species_df['sepal_length'], species_df['sepal_width'], label=species);

ax.set(xlabel='Sepal Length', ylabel='Sepal Width', title='A Wild Scatterplot appears');
ax.legend();

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6))

sns.scatterplot(data=iris, x='sepal_length', y='sepal_width', hue='species', ax=ax);

ax.set(xlabel='Sepal Length', ylabel='Sepal Width', title='A Wild Scatterplot appears');

fig = go.FigureWidget()

for species, species_df in iris.groupby('species'):
    fig.add_scatter(x=species_df['sepal_length'], y=species_df['sepal_width'],
                    mode='markers', name=species);

fig.layout.hovermode = 'closest'
fig.layout.xaxis.title = 'Sepal Length'
fig.layout.yaxis.title = 'Sepal Width'
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Scatterplot appears'
fig

Looking at the plots, the matplotlib and seaborn plots are basically identical, the only difference is in the amount of code. The seaborn library has a nice interface to generate a colored scatter plot based on the hue argument, but in matplotlib we are basically creating three scatter plots on the same axis. The different colors are automatically assigned in both (default color cycle but can also be specified for customization). Other relatively minor differences are in the labels and legend, where seaborn creates these automatically. This, in my experience, is less useful than it seems because very rarely do datasets have nicely formatted column names. Usually they contain abbreviations or symbols so you still have to assign ‘proper’ labels.

But we really want to see what Plotly has done, don’t we? This time I’ll start with the code. It’s eerily similar to matplotlib, apart from not sharing the exact syntax of course and the hovermode option. Hovering? Does that mean…? Yes, yes it does. Moving the cursor over a point reveals a tooltip showing the coordinates of the point and the class label. The tooltip can also be customized to show other information about the particular point. To the top right of the panel, there are controls to zoom, select and pan across the plot. The legend is also interactive, it acts sort of like checkboxes. You can click on a class to hide/show all the points of that class.

Since the amount or complexity of code isn’t that drastically different from the other two options and we get all these interactivity options, I’d argue this is basically free benefits.

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6))

grouped_df = iris.groupby('species').mean()
ax.bar(grouped_df.index.values, 
       grouped_df['sepal_length'].values);

ax.set(xlabel='Species', ylabel='Average Sepal Length', title='A Wild Barchart appears');

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(8,6))

sns.barplot(data=iris, x='species', y='sepal_length', estimator=np.mean, ax=ax);

ax.set(xlabel='Species', ylabel='Average Sepal Length', title='A Wild Barchart appears');

fig = go.FigureWidget()

grouped_df = iris.groupby('species').mean()
fig.add_bar(x=grouped_df.index, y=grouped_df['sepal_length']);

fig.layout.xaxis.title = 'Species'
fig.layout.yaxis.title = 'Average Sepal Length'
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Barchart appears'
fig

The bar chart story is similar to the scatter plots. In this case, again, seaborn provides the option within the function call to specify the metric to be shown on the y axis using the x variable as the grouping variable. For the other two, we have to do this ourselves using pandas. Plotly still provides interactivity out of the box.

Now that we’ve seen that Plotly can hold its own against our usual plotting options, let’s see what other benefits it can bring to the table. I will showcase some trace types in Plotly that are useful in a data science workflow, and how interactivity can make them more informative.

Heatmaps

fig = go.FigureWidget()

cor_mat = car_crashes.corr()
fig.add_heatmap(z=cor_mat, 
                x=cor_mat.columns,
                y=cor_mat.columns,
                showscale=True)

fig.layout.width = 500
fig.layout.height = 500
fig.layout.yaxis.automargin = True
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Heatmap appears'
fig

Heatmaps are commonly used to plot correlation or confusion matrices. As expected, we can hover over the squares to get more information about the variables. I’ll paint a picture for you. Suppose you have trained a linear regression model to predict something from this dataset. You can then show the appropriate coefficients in the hover tooltips to get a better idea of which correlations in the data the model has captured.

Parallel coordinates plot

fig = go.FigureWidget()

parcords = fig.add_parcoords(dimensions=[{'label':n.title(),
                                          'values':iris[n],
                                          'range':[0,8]} for n in iris.columns[:-2]])

fig.data[0].dimensions[0].constraintrange = [4,8]
parcords.line.color = iris['species_id']
parcords.line.colorscale = make_plotly(cl.scales['3']['qual']['Set2'], repeat=True)

parcords.line.colorbar.title = ''
parcords.line.colorbar.tickvals = np.unique(iris['species_id']).tolist()
parcords.line.colorbar.ticktext = np.unique(iris['species']).tolist()
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Parallel Coordinates Plot appears'
fig

I suspect some of you might not yet be familiar with this visualization, as I wasn’t a few months ago. This is a parallel coordinates plot of four variables. Each variable is shown on a separate vertical axis. Each line corresponds to a row in the dataset and the color obviously shows which class that row belongs to. A thing that should jump out at you is that the class separation in each variable axis is clearly visible. For instance, the Petal_Length variable can be used to classify all the Setosa flowers very well.

Since the plot is interactive, the axes can be reordered by dragging to explore interconnectedness between the classes and how it affects the class separations. Another interesting interaction is the constrained range widget (the bright pink object on the Sepal_Length axis). It can be dragged up or down to decolor the plot. Imagine having these on all axes and finding a sweet spot where only one class is visible. As a side note, the decolored plot has a transparency effect on the lines so the density of values can be seen.

A version of this type of visualization also exists for categorical variables in Plotly. It is called Parallel Categories.

Choropleth plot

fig = go.FigureWidget()

choro = fig.add_choropleth(locations=gdp['CODE'],
                           z=gdp['GDP (BILLIONS)'],
                           text = gdp['COUNTRY'])

choro.marker.line.width = 0.1
choro.colorbar.tickprefix = '$'
choro.colorbar.title = 'GDP<br>Billions US$'
fig.layout.geo.showframe = False
fig.layout.geo.showcoastlines = False
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Choropleth appears<br>Source:\
                    <a href="https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/fields/2195.html">\
                    CIA World Factbook</a>'
fig

A choropleth is a very commonly used geographical plot. The benefit of the interactivity should be clear in this one. We can only show a single variable using the color but the tooltip can be used for extra information. Zooming in is also very useful in this case, allowing us to look at the smaller countries. The plot title contains HTML which is being rendered properly. This can be used to create fancier labels.

Interactive scatter plot

fig = go.FigureWidget()

scatter_trace = fig.add_scattergl(x=diamonds['carat'], y=diamonds['price'],
                                  mode='markers', marker={'opacity':0.2});

fig.layout.hovermode = 'closest'
fig.layout.xaxis.title = 'Carat'
fig.layout.yaxis.title = 'Price'
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Scatterplot appears'
fig

I’m using the scattergl trace type here. This is a version of the scatter plot which uses WebGL in the background so that the interactions don’t get laggy even with larger datasets.

There is quite a bit of over-plotting here even with the aggressive transparency, so let’s zoom into the densest part to take a closer look. Zooming in reveals that the carat variable is quantized and there are clean vertical lines.

def selection_handler(trace, points, selector):
    data_mean = np.mean(points.ys)
    fig.data[0].figure.layout.title.text = f'A Wild Scatterplot appears - mean price: ${data_mean:.1f}'
fig.data[0].on_selection(selection_handler)

fig

Selecting a bunch of points in this scatter plot will change the title of the plot to show the mean price of the selected points. This could prove to be very useful in a plot where there are groups and you want to visually see some statistics of a cluster.

This behavior is easily implemented using callback functions attached to predefined event handlers for each trace.

More interactivity

Let’s do something fancier now.

fig1 = go.FigureWidget()
fig1.add_scattergl(x=exports['beef'], y=exports['total exports'],
                   text=exports['state'],
                   mode='markers');
fig1.layout.hovermode = 'closest'
fig1.layout.xaxis.title = 'Beef Exports in Million US$'
fig1.layout.yaxis.title = 'Total Exports in Million US$'
fig1.layout.title = 'A Wild Scatterplot appears'

fig2 = go.FigureWidget()
fig2.add_choropleth(locations=exports['code'],
                    z=exports['total exports'].astype('float64'),
                    text=exports['state'],
                    locationmode='USA-states')
fig2.data[0].marker.line.width = 0.1
fig2.data[0].marker.line.color = 'white'
fig2.data[0].marker.line.width = 2
fig2.data[0].colorbar.title = 'Exports Millions USD'
fig2.layout.geo.showframe = False
fig2.layout.geo.scope = 'usa'
fig2.layout.geo.showcoastlines = False
fig2.layout.title = 'A Wild Choropleth appears'

def do_selection(trace, points, selector):
    if trace is fig2.data[0]:
        fig1.data[0].selectedpoints = points.point_inds
    else:
        fig2.data[0].selectedpoints = points.point_inds
fig1.data[0].on_selection(do_selection)
fig2.data[0].on_selection(do_selection)

HBox([fig1, fig2])

We have already seen how to make scatter and choropleth plots so let’s put them to use and plot the same data-frame. Then, using the event handlers we also saw before, we can link both plots together and interactively explore which states produce which kinds of goods.

This kind of interactive exploration of different slices of the dataset is far more intuitive and natural than transforming the data in pandas and then plotting it again.

fig = go.FigureWidget()
fig.add_histogram(x=iris['sepal_length'],
                  histnorm='probability density');
fig.layout.xaxis.title = 'Sepal Length'
fig.layout.yaxis.title = 'Probability Density'
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Histogram appears'

def change_binsize(s):
    fig.data[0].xbins.size = s
slider = interactive(change_binsize, s=(0.1,1,0.1))
label = Label('Bin Size: ')

VBox([HBox([label, slider]),
      fig])

Using the ipywidgets module’s interactive controls different aspects of the plot can be changed to gain a better understanding of the data. Here the bin size of the histogram is being controlled.

fig = go.FigureWidget()

scatter_trace = fig.add_scattergl(x=diamonds['carat'], y=diamonds['price'],
                                  mode='markers', marker={'opacity':0.2});

fig.layout.hovermode = 'closest'
fig.layout.xaxis.title = 'Carat'
fig.layout.yaxis.title = 'Price'
fig.layout.title = 'A Wild Scatterplot appears'

def change_opacity(x):
    fig.data[0].marker.opacity = x
slider = interactive(change_opacity, x=(0.1,1,0.1))
label = Label('Marker Opacity: ')

VBox([HBox([label, slider]),
      fig])

The opacity of the markers in this scatter plot is controlled by the slider. These examples only control the visual or layout aspects of the plot. We can also change the actual data which is being shown using dropdowns. I’ll leave you to explore that on your own.

What have we learned about Python plots

Let’s take a step back and sum up what we have learned. We saw that Plotly can reveal more information about our data using interactive controls, which we get for free and with no extra code. We saw a few interesting, slightly more complex visualizations available to us. We then combined the plots with custom widgets to create custom interactive workflows.

All this is just scratching the surface of what Plotly is capable of. There are many more trace types, an animations framework, and integration with Dash to create professional dashboards and probably a few other things that I don’t even know of.

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9 important plots in data science