Is any simpler way to plot GeoPandas data in Altair chart?

Question

The basic way to display GeoDataFrame in Altair:

import altair as alt
import geopandas as gpd

alt.renderers.enable('notebook')

world = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path('naturalearth_lowres'))

data  = alt.InlineData(values = world[world.continent=='Africa'].__geo_interface__, #geopandas to geojson
                       # root object type is "FeatureCollection" but we need its features
                       format = alt.DataFormat(property='features',type='json')) 
alt.Chart(data).mark_geoshape(
).encode( 
    color='properties.pop_est:Q', # GeoDataFrame fields are accessible through a "properties" object 
    tooltip=['properties.name:N','properties.pop_est:Q']
).properties( 

    width=500,
    height=300
)

But it will crush if I add column with Nan or DateTime values.

Answer 1

1. At first you can use world = alt.utils.sanitize_dataframe(world) to convert columns with JSON incompatible types.
2. Or you can use gpdvega module to simplify code.

import altair as alt
import geopandas as gpd
import gpdvega 

alt.renderers.enable('notebook')

world = gpd.read_file(gpd.datasets.get_path('naturalearth_lowres'))

alt.Chart(world[world.continent=='Africa']).mark_geoshape(
).encode( 
    color='pop_est', 
    tooltip=['name','pop_est']
).properties( 
    width=500,
    height=300
)

Just pip install gpdvega and import gpdvega. altair will work with GeoDataFrame as usual DataFrame. See details in documentation