Plot Functions

A Declarative Generic Plot Function

Handling, transforming, and plotting high-dimensional data is difficult and often requires specialization to use-cases. dantro provides the generic facet_grid() plot function that - together with the other dantro features - allows for a declarative way of creating plots from high-dimensional data.

The idea is that high-dimensional raw data first is transformed using the Data Transformation Framework. The facet_grid() function then gets the ready-to-plot data as input and visualizes it by automatically choosing an appropriate kind of plot – if possible and not explicitely given – in a declarative way through specification of layout keywords such as for example colums, rows, or hue. This approach is called faceting; dantro makes use of the excellent plotting functionality of xarray for this feature. The facet_grid() plot function further extends the xarray plotting functionality by adding the possibility to create animations, simply by using the frames argument to specify the data dimension to represent as individual frames of an animation.

The PlotHelper interface then copes with the plot style and further layout. All steps are fully configurable and optimized for the YAML-based plotting interface. Thus, generating a plot of multidimensional data does not require touching any actual code but just specifying the desired representation in the plot configuration. 🎉

For more information, have a look at the facet_grid() docstring.