3D Line Plots in Python

How to make 3D Line Plots

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Plotly is a free and open-source graphing library for Python. We recommend you read our Getting Started guide for the latest installation or upgrade instructions, then move on to our Plotly Fundamentals tutorials or dive straight in to some Basic Charts tutorials.

3D Line plot with Plotly Express¶

In [1]:

import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder().query("country=='Brazil'")
fig = px.line_3d(df, x="gdpPercap", y="pop", z="year")
fig.show()

In [2]:

import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.gapminder().query("continent=='Europe'")
fig = px.line_3d(df, x="gdpPercap", y="pop", z="year", color='country')
fig.show()

3D Line Plot of Brownian Motion¶

Here we represent a trajectory in 3D.

In [3]:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

rs = np.random.RandomState()
rs.seed(0)

def brownian_motion(T = 1, N = 100, mu = 0.1, sigma = 0.01, S0 = 20):
    dt = float(T)/N
    t = np.linspace(0, T, N)
    W = rs.standard_normal(size = N)
    W = np.cumsum(W)*np.sqrt(dt) # standard brownian motion
    X = (mu-0.5*sigma**2)*t + sigma*W
    S = S0*np.exp(X) # geometric brownian motion
    return S

dates = pd.date_range('2012-01-01', '2013-02-22')
T = (dates.max()-dates.min()).days / 365
N = dates.size
start_price = 100
y = brownian_motion(T, N, sigma=0.1, S0=start_price)
z = brownian_motion(T, N, sigma=0.1, S0=start_price)

fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter3d(
    x=dates, y=y, z=z,
    marker=dict(
        size=4,
        color=z,
        colorscale='Viridis',
    ),
    line=dict(
        color='darkblue',
        width=2
    )
))

fig.update_layout(
    width=800,
    height=700,
    autosize=False,
    scene=dict(
        camera=dict(
            up=dict(
                x=0,
                y=0,
                z=1
            ),
            eye=dict(
                x=0,
                y=1.0707,
                z=1,
            )
        ),
        aspectratio = dict( x=1, y=1, z=0.7 ),
        aspectmode = 'manual'
    ),
)

fig.show()

Reference¶

See function reference for px.(line_3d) or https://plotly.com/python/reference/scatter3d/#scatter3d-marker-line for more information and chart attribute options!

What About Dash?¶

Dash is an open-source framework for building analytical applications, with no Javascript required, and it is tightly integrated with the Plotly graphing library.

Learn about how to install Dash at https://dash.plot.ly/installation.

Everywhere in this page that you see fig.show(), you can display the same figure in a Dash application by passing it to the figure argument of the Graph component from the built-in dash_core_components package like this:

import plotly.graph_objects as go # or plotly.express as px
fig = go.Figure() # or any Plotly Express function e.g. px.bar(...)
# fig.add_trace( ... )
# fig.update_layout( ... )

from dash import Dash, dcc, html

app = Dash()
app.layout = html.Div([
    dcc.Graph(figure=fig)
])

app.run_server(debug=True, use_reloader=False)  # Turn off reloader if inside Jupyter