Suggestions to plot overlapping lines in matplotlib?

Question

Does anybody have a suggestion on what's the best way to present overlapping lines on a plot? I have a lot of them, and I had the idea of having full lines of different colors where they don't overlap, and having dashed lines where they do overlap so that all colors are visible and overlapping colors are seen.

But still, how do I that.

Answer 1

Just decrease the opacity of the lines so that they are see-through. You can achieve that using the alpha variable. Example:

plt.plot(x, y, alpha=0.7)

Where alpha ranging from 0-1, with 0 being invisible.

Answer 2

I have the same issue on a plot with a high degree of discretization.

Here the starting situation:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt grid=[x for x in range(10)] graphs=[         [1,1,1,4,4,4,3,5,6,0],         [1,1,1,5,5,5,3,5,6,0],         [1,1,1,0,0,3,3,2,4,0],         [1,2,4,4,3,2,3,2,4,0],         [1,2,3,3,4,4,3,2,6,0],         [1,1,3,3,0,3,3,5,4,3],         ]  for gg,graph in enumerate(graphs):     plt.plot(grid,graph,label='g'+str(gg))  plt.legend(loc=3,bbox_to_anchor=(1,0)) plt.show() 

No one can say where the green and blue lines run exactly

and my "solution"

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt grid=[x for x in range(10)] graphs=[         [1,1,1,4,4,4,3,5,6,0],         [1,1,1,5,5,5,3,5,6,0],         [1,1,1,0,0,3,3,2,4,0],         [1,2,4,4,3,2,3,2,4,0],         [1,2,3,3,4,4,3,2,6,0],         [1,1,3,3,0,3,3,5,4,3],         ]  for gg,graph in enumerate(graphs):     lw=10-8*gg/len(graphs)     ls=['-','--','-.',':'][gg%4]     plt.plot(grid,graph,label='g'+str(gg), linestyle=ls, linewidth=lw)  plt.legend(loc=3,bbox_to_anchor=(1,0)) plt.show() 

I am grateful for suggestions on improvement!