How can I make a scatter plot colored by density in matplotlib?

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Method 1

In addition to hist2d or hexbin as @askewchan suggested, you can use the same method that the accepted answer in the question you linked to uses.

If you want to do that:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.stats import gaussian_kde

# Generate fake data
x = np.random.normal(size=1000)
y = x * 3 + np.random.normal(size=1000)

# Calculate the point density
xy = np.vstack([x,y])
z = gaussian_kde(xy)(xy)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter(x, y, c=z, s=100)
plt.show()

How can I make a scatter plot colored by density in matplotlib?

If you’d like the points to be plotted in order of density so that the densest points are always on top (similar to the linked example), just sort them by the z-values. I’m also going to use a smaller marker size here as it looks a bit better:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from scipy.stats import gaussian_kde

# Generate fake data
x = np.random.normal(size=1000)
y = x * 3 + np.random.normal(size=1000)

# Calculate the point density
xy = np.vstack([x,y])
z = gaussian_kde(xy)(xy)

# Sort the points by density, so that the densest points are plotted last
idx = z.argsort()
x, y, z = x[idx], y[idx], z[idx]

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.scatter(x, y, c=z, s=50)
plt.show()

How can I make a scatter plot colored by density in matplotlib?

Method 2

Also, if the number of point makes KDE calculation too slow, color can be interpolated in np.histogram2d [Update in response to comments: If you wish to show the colorbar, use plt.scatter() instead of ax.scatter() followed by plt.colorbar()]:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import cm
from matplotlib.colors import Normalize 
from scipy.interpolate import interpn

def density_scatter( x , y, ax = None, sort = True, bins = 20, **kwargs )   :
    """
    Scatter plot colored by 2d histogram
    """
    if ax is None :
        fig , ax = plt.subplots()
    data , x_e, y_e = np.histogram2d( x, y, bins = bins, density = True )
    z = interpn( ( 0.5*(x_e[1:] + x_e[:-1]) , 0.5*(y_e[1:]+y_e[:-1]) ) , data , np.vstack([x,y]).T , method = "splinef2d", bounds_error = False)

    #To be sure to plot all data
    z[np.where(np.isnan(z))] = 0.0

    # Sort the points by density, so that the densest points are plotted last
    if sort :
        idx = z.argsort()
        x, y, z = x[idx], y[idx], z[idx]

    ax.scatter( x, y, c=z, **kwargs )

    norm = Normalize(vmin = np.min(z), vmax = np.max(z))
    cbar = fig.colorbar(cm.ScalarMappable(norm = norm), ax=ax)
    cbar.ax.set_ylabel('Density')

    return ax


if "__main__" == __name__ :

    x = np.random.normal(size=100000)
    y = x * 3 + np.random.normal(size=100000)
    density_scatter( x, y, bins = [30,30] )

Method 3

Plotting >100k data points?

The accepted answer, using gaussian_kde() will take a lot of time. On my machine, 100k rows took about 11 minutes. Here I will add two alternative methods (mpl-scatter-density and datashader) and compare the given answers with same dataset.

In the following, I used a test data set of 100k rows:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# Fake data for testing
x = np.random.normal(size=100000)
y = x * 3 + np.random.normal(size=100000)

Output & computation time comparison

Below is a comparison of different methods.

`1: mpl-scatter-density`

Installation

pip install mpl-scatter-density

Example code

import mpl_scatter_density # adds projection='scatter_density'
from matplotlib.colors import LinearSegmentedColormap

# "Viridis-like" colormap with white background
white_viridis = LinearSegmentedColormap.from_list('white_viridis', [
    (0, '#ffffff'),
    (1e-20, '#440053'),
    (0.2, '#404388'),
    (0.4, '#2a788e'),
    (0.6, '#21a784'),
    (0.8, '#78d151'),
    (1, '#fde624'),
], N=256)

def using_mpl_scatter_density(fig, x, y):
    ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1, projection='scatter_density')
    density = ax.scatter_density(x, y, cmap=white_viridis)
    fig.colorbar(density, label='Number of points per pixel')

fig = plt.figure()
using_mpl_scatter_density(fig, x, y)
plt.show()

Drawing this took 0.05 seconds:

And the zoom-in looks quite nice:

`2: datashader`

Datashader is an interesting project. It has added support for matplotlib in datashader 0.12.

Installation

pip install datashader

Code (source & parameterer listing for dsshow):


import datashader as ds
from datashader.mpl_ext import dsshow
import pandas as pd


def using_datashader(ax, x, y):

    df = pd.DataFrame(dict(x=x, y=y))
    dsartist = dsshow(
        df,
        ds.Point("x", "y"),
        ds.count(),
        vmin=0,
        vmax=35,
        norm="linear",
        aspect="auto",
        ax=ax,
    )

    plt.colorbar(dsartist)


fig, ax = plt.subplots()
using_datashader(ax, x, y)
plt.show()

It took 0.83 s to draw this:

There is also possibility to colorize by third variable. The third parameter for dsshow controls the coloring. See more examples here and the source for dsshow here.

`3: scatter_with_gaussian_kde`

def scatter_with_gaussian_kde(ax, x, y):
    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/20107592/3015186
    # Answer by Joel Kington

    xy = np.vstack([x, y])
    z = gaussian_kde(xy)(xy)

    ax.scatter(x, y, c=z, s=100, edgecolor='')

It took 11 minutes to draw this:

`4: using_hist2d`

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
def using_hist2d(ax, x, y, bins=(50, 50)):
    # https://stackoverflow.com/a/20105673/3015186
    # Answer by askewchan
    ax.hist2d(x, y, bins, cmap=plt.cm.jet)

It took 0.021 s to draw this bins=(50,50):
It took 0.173 s to draw this bins=(1000,1000):
Cons: The zoomed-in data does not look as good as in with mpl-scatter-density or datashader. Also you have to determine the number of bins yourself.

`5: density_scatter`

The code is as in the answer by Guillaume.
It took 0.073 s to draw this with bins=(50,50):
It took 0.368 s to draw this with bins=(1000,1000):

Method 4

You could make a histogram:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# fake data:
a = np.random.normal(size=1000)
b = a*3 + np.random.normal(size=1000)

plt.hist2d(a, b, (50, 50), cmap=plt.cm.jet)
plt.colorbar()

2dhist

All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0

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