Plotting with keywords

There are some instances where you have data in a format that lets you access particular variables with strings: for example, with numpy.recarray or pandas.DataFrame.

Matplotlib allows you to provide such an object with the data keyword argument. If provided, you may generate plots with the strings corresponding to these variables.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

np.random.seed(19680801)

data = {'a': np.arange(50),
        'c': np.random.randint(0, 50, 50),
        'd': np.random.randn(50)}
data['b'] = data['a'] + 10 * np.random.randn(50)
data['d'] = np.abs(data['d']) * 100

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter('a', 'b', c='c', s='d', data=data)
ax.set(xlabel='entry a', ylabel='entry b')
plt.show()