Parallel coordinate chart with Python and Plotly


This blogpost explains how to build a parallel coordinate chart with Python and Plotly. The result is interactive, you can select an area to highlight the according groups.

Most basic parallel coordinate chart with plotly

Plotly is an awesome python library sending the power of Javascript to Python. Javascript is the language used in browser to make a webpage interactive.

Fortunately, plotly provides a parallel_coordinates() function that can be used as follow to build this chart type:

# Import the library
import plotly.express as px

# Load the iris dataset provided by the library
df = px.data.iris()

# Create the chart:
fig = px.parallel_coordinates(
    df, 
    color="species_id", 
    labels={"species_id": "Species","sepal_width": "Sepal Width", "sepal_length": "Sepal Length", "petal_width": "Petal Width", "petal_length": "Petal Length", },
    color_continuous_scale=px.colors.diverging.Tealrose,
    color_continuous_midpoint=2)

# Hide the color scale that is useless in this case
fig.update_layout(coloraxis_showscale=False)

# Show the plot
fig.show()

Note that you can save this chart to a standalone file thanks to the write.html() function. It is then possible to render it in any html document using an <iframe>

# If you need to save this file as a standalone html file:
fig.write_html("../../static/interactiveCharts/parallel-coordinate-plot-plotly.html")
%%html
<iframe src="../../interactiveCharts/parallel-coordinate-plot-plotly.html" width="800" height="600" title="parallel coordinate chart with plotly" style="border:none"></iframe>

Barplot

Spider / Radar

Wordcloud

Parallel

Lollipop

Circular Barplot

Contact & Edit

👋 This document is a work by Yan Holtz. Any feedback is highly encouraged. You can fill an issue on Github, drop me a message onTwitter, or send an email pasting yan.holtz.data with gmail.com.

This page is just a jupyter notebook, you can edit it here. Please help me making this website better 🙏!

Violin

Density

Histogram

Boxplot

Ridgeline

Scatterplot

Heatmap

Correlogram

Bubble

Connected Scatter

2D Density

Barplot

Spider / Radar

Wordcloud

Parallel

Lollipop

Circular Barplot

Treemap

Venn Diagram

Donut

Pie Chart

Dendrogram

Circular Packing

Line chart

Area chart

Stacked Area

Streamgraph

Timeseries with python

Timeseries

Map

Choropleth

Hexbin

Cartogram

Connection

Bubble

Chord Diagram

Network

Sankey

Arc Diagram

Edge Bundling

Colors

Interactivity

Animation with python

Animation

Cheat sheets

Caveats

3D