Data Science & Machine Learning - 6.4 Matplotlib Plots Customization

Hi friends,

Welcome to this post on Matplotlib Plots Customization under Data Science & Machine Learning. In the previous post, we discussed how to draw subplots using Matplotlib. In this post, we will learn to customize (plot color, plot style, etc.) our plots.

Note: All the commands discussed below are run in the Jupyter Notebook environment. See this post on Jupyter Notebook to know about it in detail.

Matplotlib Plots Customization

Let's first import the Matplotlib library and also recreate the NumPy Array we created in the previous post as the data for the plots. I suggest you to go through this post if you find any difficulties in any of the statements executed below:

Let's now create some plots with the Matplotlib:

Change the plot color

Matplotlib supports two ways (using the color name and the RGB hex code) of changing the color of the plot using the color parameter of the plot method. I have changed the plot color to black using these two ways in the below example:

Change the line opacity

We can also change the opacity of the line of the plot using the alpha parameter of the plot method. The higher the alpha value the more opaque the plot. I have set the opacity to 0.8 in the below example:

Change the line width

We can change the width of the line of the plot using the linewidth parameter of the plot method. I have changed the linewidth to five times the default line width in the below example:

Change the line style

Matplotlib also supports various line styles for the plots. These can be changed by the linestyle parameter of the plot method. Below is an example of the dashed line style supported by the plot method:

Here is a list of all the style types supported by the plot method:

['solid' | 'dashed' | 'dashdot' | 'dotted' | (offset, on-off-dash-seq) |  '-' | '--' | '-.' | ':' | 'None' | ' ' | '']

Marker for the actual points

Matplotlib also supports marking actual points on the graph using the marker parameter of the plot() method. Here is an example of triangle down marker:

The following link lists all the marker types supported by the plot method. I also recommend visiting this awesome link which provides tons of other customization options we can do with Matplotlib. With this, we end this post on Matplotlib. From the next post onward, we'll learn about Seaborn, another very important Data Science library to plot beautiful statistical plots.