Plotting

Last updated on 2026-02-20 | Edit this page

Overview

Questions

How do I create plots in Python?

Objectives

Create basic plots in Python using the Matplotlib library

There are several different Python plotting libraries. Perhaps the most popular one is Matplotlib, initially released back in 2003. Another library, called Seaborn, is based on Matplotlib, and provides “nicer” defaults for colors and plots, making it easier to build beautiful publication-ready plots. A modern alternative is Plotly, that is available not only in Python, but also in R, Julia, JavaScript, MatLab, and F#. This tutorial serves as a brief introduction into Matplotlib.

Introduction to plots: histograms

We’ll use a dataset of reference genomes of Streptomyces. To download it and load it into the Python environment, we can use the Pandas library.

PYTHON

import pandas as pd
data = pd.read_csv("https://raw.githubusercontent.com/carpentries-incubator/pangenomics-python/gh-pages/data/streptomyces.csv")
data

Matplotlib is a large library; however, most plotting functions are available in the matplotlib.pyplot module, which is usually imported as follows.

PYTHON

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

The Matplotlib official website provides a convenient page showing the main plot types available. We’ll begin with a histogram showing the number of genes per reference assembly, which can be accomplished by using the plt.hist function and pass the "genes" column of the dataset, grouping the values automatically. Use the plt.show() function to draw the plot on the screen.

PYTHON

plt.hist(data["genes"])
plt.show()

The plt.hist function has many many options that allow you to customize how the chart looks like. For instance, we can use the bins parameter to set the number of bars in the histogram. Furthermore, plots are useless without proper labels, so we’ll use the plt.xlabel, plt.ylabel and plt.title functions to define the label for the x axis, the label for the y axis, and the title for the plot, respectively.

PYTHON

plt.hist(data["genes"], bins=20)
plt.xlabel("Number of genes")
plt.ylabel("Number of assemblies")
plt.title("Number of genes per Streptomyces assembly")
plt.show()

Bars and lines

Whereas plt.hist allows you to pass the variables directly, other plot types require you to perform some manipulations on the dataset, because we should explicitly provide both the x and y axes. The plt.bar function, as its name suggests, creates bar plots; we’ll use it to visualize the number of chromosomes per assembly in our dataset. First, we take the "chromosomes" column from the dataset, and use the .value_counts() method to count how many times each chromosome count appears in it. This method returns a Pandas Series, with an index and values which we can access. So, in order to build the bar plot, we first provide the unique chromosome counts for the x axis, and the values for the y axis. We’ll also change the bar colors to dark red and add labels.

PYTHON

chromosomes = data["chromosomes"].value_counts()
chromosomes

OUTPUT

chromosomes
1.0    100
2.0     42
3.0     15
4.0      3
5.0      3
Name: count, dtype: int64

PYTHON

plt.bar(chromosomes.index, chromosomes.values, color="darkred")
plt.xlabel("Number of chromosomes")
plt.ylabel("Number of assemblies")
plt.title("Number of chromosomes per assembly in Streptomyces")
plt.show()

Callout

Going horizontal: creating horizontal bar plots

If you wish to use a horizontal bar plot instead of a vertical one, use the plt.barh function. Don’t forget to change your labels accordingly!

Let’s now learn how to build line plots using plt.plot by visualizing the number of reference assemblies released by year. Similar to the previous example, we’ll use the .value_counts method on the "release_year" columns to count the number of assemblies per year; however, this method sorts the index by the count, so in order to keep the original order (which is already chronological), we pass the sort=False parameter. Next, we provide the index and values for the x and y axes of our plot.

PYTHON

genomes_year = data["release_year"].value_counts(sort=False)
genomes_year

OUTPUT

release_year
2008      1
2009      3
2010      1
2011      1
2012      2
2013      8
2014     35
2015     24
2016     43
2017     25
2018     44
2019     76
2020    153
2021     81
2022     51
2023     34
2024     21
Name: count, dtype: int64

PYTHON

plt.plot(genomes_year.index, genomes_year.values)
plt.xlabel("Year")
plt.ylabel("Released assemblies")
plt.title("Released reference Streptomyces assemblies per year")
plt.show()

A nice feature about plt.plot is that we can change the way the line looks like, either by modifying the edges and/or the vertices. You can find the format guide in the “Format Strings” section of the function’s documentation. Some example strings you can use are depicted in the next code block.

PYTHON

"--"    # Dashed line
":"     # Dotted line
"o"     # Large dots only
"v"     # Down-facing triangles only
"s"     # Squares only
"--o"   # Dashed line with large dots
":s"    # Dotted line with squares

Let’s modify our plot by making it dotted with large dots, with a dark green color.

PYTHON

plt.plot(genomes_year.index, genomes_year.values, ':o', color="darkgreen")
plt.xlabel("Year")
plt.ylabel("Released Genomes")
plt.title("Released Reference Streptomyces Genomes per Year")
plt.show()

Challenge

Exercise (Beginner): Plotting with Matplotlib

Complete the following code block to create a horizontal bar plot with the number of assemblies with conclusive and inconclusive taxonomy from the dataset. Use purple to color the bars.

PYTHON

taxonomy = data["taxonomy_status"].________()
plt.________(taxonomy.________, taxonomy.__________, ________="purple")
plt.________("Taxonomy status")
plt.________("Assembly count")
plt.title("Taxonomic status of Streptomyces assemblies")
plt.show()

Show me the solution

PYTHON

taxonomy = data["taxonomy_status"].value_counts()
plt.barh(taxonomy.index, taxonomy.values, color="purple")
plt.ylabel("Taxonomy status")
plt.xlabel("Assembly count")
plt.title("Taxonomic status of Streptomyces assemblies")
plt.show()

Callout

Multiple plots in a single figure

Extra content

The plt.subplots(x, y) function creates a multi-plot figure with x rows and y columns. It returns a Figure object that allows to modify general aspects of the figure, and an empty array which will store the plots and are accessible via indices. As an example, we’ll create a figure with one column and three rows and place the three plots be made in the lesson. Instead of using .xlabel, .ylabel and .title, we use .set_xlabel, .set_ylabel and .set_title, respectively. At the end, we use the set_figheight method to set the height for the entire figure, and the .tight_layout method on the figure in order to ensure that everything fits in properly.

PYTHON

# Figure initialization
fig, ax = plt.subplots(3)

# First plot: histogram
ax[0].hist(data["genes"], bins=20)
ax[0].set_xlabel("Number of genes")
ax[0].set_ylabel("Number of assembly")
ax[0].set_title("Genes per assembly")

# Second plot: bar
ax[1].bar(chromosomes.index, chromosomes.values, color="darkred")
ax[1].set_xlabel("Number of chromosomes")
ax[1].set_ylabel("Number of assemblies")
ax[1].set_title("Chromosomes per assembly")

# Third plot: line
ax[2].plot(genomes_year.index, genomes_year.values, ':o', color="darkgreen")
ax[2].set_xlabel("Year")
ax[2].set_ylabel("Released Genomes")
ax[2].set_title("Assemblies per year")

# Figure configuration
fig.set_figheight(12)
fig.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Key Points

Matplotlib is a popular plotting library for Python