Change pandas plotting backend to get interactive plots instead of matplotlib static plots

Question

When I use pandas df.plot() it has matplotlib as a default plotting backend. But this creates static plots.

I would like interactive plots, so I have to change the pandas plotting background.

How do I do change the plotting backend of pandas to have a different library creating my plots when i use .plot()?

Answer 1

You need pandas >= 0.25 to change the plotting backend of pandas.

The available plotting backends are:

• matplotlib
  
• hvplot >= 0.5.1
  
• holoviews
  
• pandas_bokeh
  
• plotly >= 4.8
  
• altair
  

So, the default setting is:

pd.options.plotting.backend = 'matplotlib'

You can change the plotting library that pandas uses as follows. In this case it sets hvplot / holoviews as the plotting backend:

pd.options.plotting.backend = 'hvplot'

Or you can also use (which is basically the same):

pd.set_option('plotting.backend', 'hvplot')

Now you have hvplot / holoviews as your plotting backend for pandas and it will give you interactive holoviews plots instead of static matplotlib plots.

Of course you need to have library hvplot / holoviews + dependencies installed for this to work.

Here's a code example resulting in an interactive plot. It uses the standard .plot() pandas syntax:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd

import hvplot
import hvplot.pandas

pd.options.plotting.backend = 'hvplot'

data = np.random.normal(size=[50, 2])

df = pd.DataFrame(data, columns=['x', 'y'])

df.plot(kind='scatter', x='x', y='y')