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

Question

I'd like to make a scatter plot where each point is colored by the spatial density of nearby points.

I've come across a very similar question, which shows an example of this using R:

R Scatter Plot: symbol color represents number of overlapping points

What's the best way to accomplish something similar in python using matplotlib?

Answer 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()

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()

Answer 2

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()

Answer 3

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] )

Answer 4

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. However, the support for matplotlib is WIP as of Sep 2020. I installed the mpl branch from the clone of nvictus :

pip install "git+https://github.com/nvictus/datashader.git@mpl"

Code (source of dsshow here ):

from functools import partial

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

dyn = partial(ds.tf.dynspread, max_px=40, threshold=0.5)

def using_datashader(ax, x, y):

    df = pd.DataFrame(dict(x=x, y=y))
    da1 = dsshow(df, ds.Point('x', 'y'), spread_fn=dyn, aspect='auto', ax=ax)
    plt.colorbar(da1)

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

• It took 0.83 s to draw this:

and the zoomed image looks great!

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):