frequency trail in matplotlib

Question

I'm looking into outliers detection. Brendan Gregg has a really nice article and I'm especially intrigued by his visualizations. One of the methods he uses are frequency trails.

I'm trying to reproduce this in matplotlib using this example. Which looks like this:

And the plot is based on this answer: https://stackoverflow.com/a/4152016/948369

Now my issue is, like described by Brendan, that I have a continuous line that masks the outlier (I simplified the input values so you can still see them):

Any help on making the line "non-continuous" for non existent values?

Answer 1

Seaborn also provides a very neat example:

They call it a joy/ridge plot however: https://seaborn.pydata.org/examples/kde_ridgeplot.html

#!/usr/bin/python
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sns.set(style="white", rc={"axes.facecolor": (0, 0, 0, 0)})

# Create the data
rs = np.random.RandomState(1979)
x = rs.randn(500)
g = np.tile(list("ABCDEFGHIJ"), 50)
df = pd.DataFrame(dict(x=x, g=g))
m = df.g.map(ord)
df["x"] += m

# Initialize the FacetGrid object
pal = sns.cubehelix_palette(10, rot=-.25, light=.7)
g = sns.FacetGrid(df, row="g", hue="g", aspect=15, size=.5, palette=pal)

# Draw the densities in a few steps
g.map(sns.kdeplot, "x", clip_on=False, shade=True, alpha=1, lw=1.5, bw=.2)
g.map(sns.kdeplot, "x", clip_on=False, color="w", lw=2, bw=.2)
g.map(plt.axhline, y=0, lw=2, clip_on=False)

# Define and use a simple function to label the plot in axes coordinates
def label(x, color, label):
    ax = plt.gca()
    ax.text(0, .2, label, fontweight="bold", color=color, 
            ha="left", va="center", transform=ax.transAxes)

g.map(label, "x")

# Set the subplots to overlap
g.fig.subplots_adjust(hspace=-.25)

# Remove axes details that don't play will with overlap
g.set_titles("")
g.set(yticks=[])
g.despine(bottom=True, left=True)