Animated Scatter Plot using Python

A scatter plot is one of the most useful ways to analyze the relationship between two features. You must have used a scatter plot before if you are learning data science but have you ever tried to create an animated scatter plot using Python? If you want to learn how to visualize an animated scatter plot, this article is for you. In this article, I will take you through a tutorial on visualizing animated scatter plot using Python.

Animated Scatter Plot using Python

When you want to analyze how one feature in one dataset is affected by another feature, you probably need to use a scatter plot. You can learn more about scatter plots and how to visualize them using Python from here. Now coming back to the animated scatter plots, Python’s plotly library can be used to create animated graphs, so we can use the Plotly library to visualize a scatter plot using Python.

Now below is how you can visualize a Scatter plot by using the plotly library in Python:

import plotly.express as px
data = px.data.gapminder()
print(data.head())

       country continent  year  ...   gdpPercap  iso_alpha  iso_num
0  Afghanistan      Asia  1952  ...  779.445314        AFG        4
1  Afghanistan      Asia  1957  ...  820.853030        AFG        4
2  Afghanistan      Asia  1962  ...  853.100710        AFG        4
3  Afghanistan      Asia  1967  ...  836.197138        AFG        4
4  Afghanistan      Asia  1972  ...  739.981106        AFG        4

[5 rows x 8 columns]

px.scatter(data, x="gdpPercap", y="lifeExp", animation_frame="year", animation_group="country",
           size="pop", color="country", hover_name="country",
           log_x=True, size_max=55, range_x=[100,100000], range_y=[25,90])

In the code above, I am using a dataset provided by the plotly library itself. The dataset covers the GDP per capita of all countries. Here I am visualizing the GDP per capita of countries on the x-axis and life expectancy on the y-axis. Once you run this code, you will see the animated output as shown below.

Summary

So this is how you can visualize animated figures by using the plotly library in Python. The plotly library in Python is a very useful tool that can be used to create animated graphs using Python. I hope you liked this article on how to visualize animated scatter plots using Python. Feel free to ask your valuable questions in the comments section below.