Plotly Interactive Plots as Pandas Plotting Backend df.plot()

Key Takeaways

hey friends welcome to one little coder in this video this is going to be actually a very short video we're going to learn how to set up your plotly interactive visualization as your pandas back-end so by default let's first see when you make a plot using pandas it's going to use matplotlib as the default backend so let's see let's try to make a small plot so let's create um dataframe from a dictionary and let's call it a is equal to one two three one to four okay whatever and b is equal to three four a five okay and now your data frame must be ready at this point okay okay pd.dataframe i missed the capital f so your data frame is ready and when you say df your data frame is going to display and when you say df.plot um and you when you execute it you're going to get a matplotlib based plot so you got a static plot right but the advantage of using plotly is that you get interactive plot and that is a reality with plotly 4.8 new version where you can use plotly as the pandas plotting library backend it is possible because of the new feature that they have released with plotly express it in fact uses plotly express plotly expresses a lighter version of plotly which we have already discussed in another video which i'll just connect in the description section and the latest feature of plotly express is that plotly express now supports white data so if you're not familiar with that so usually long data looks like this it's also called as tidy data and white data looks like this where you've got bunch of column names then all the column names repeating as individual rows so now plotly express supports this because plotly express supports this they could make it possible that now simply invoking the dot plot function you can actually make a plotly plot rather than having a matplotlib so the way you have to do it is first you have to upgrade your plotly so wherever you have your um python interpreter so please make sure that you have the latest version of plotly 4.8 so use hyphen u plotly and it will install the latest version of plotly and then once you invoke pandas let's import pandas as pd and then you say okay pd dot back end sorry pd dot options dot plotting back end is equal to plotly so when you give this at this point you have told plot pandas that you want to use the back end of plotly and not matplotlib so we'll keep this cell as it is and we'll just draw dot df dot plot so df as you can see it's a simple data frame and then you can see that it has made a plotly plot which is interactive so you can zoom you can zoom out you can pan you can do everything that you do with a simple plotly plot with a single function that is dot plot which is very handy when you are actually working with uh pandas data frame directly and you want to do a some sort of eda or you want to just do a very basic exploration so this is very handy and it doesn't take a lot of effort just you have to update your plotly and then use plotly as your backend let's say sometimes you don't want to do this right so you don't want a heavy javascript or visualization always on your notebook because you might want to share it and you don't want to mbr files if you want it to be back you don't want plotly and you want the old matplotlib backend you can say matplotlib as a backend and then you can run the same thing and you would get matplotlib so it's it's as simple as that use your main uh function as main execute statement that you have to execute is dot pd.options.plotlink. end and you decide what you want and please make sure that you have got the latest version of plotly which is plotly 4.8 it's already available on pi by so you can simply use pip install and read more about their announcement what are all changes that they have brought and you can see a few examples of how you can use wide data and then make plotly express plots and you can also see how what kind of plots that uh dot plot from pandas can bring it for you so this is a very short video and i wanted to be short because i wanted to introduce this new facility so i hope this video was helpful for you and if you have any comments please let me know in the comment section and until that next video i'll see you see you bye