The grammar of graphics (Wilkinson 1999, 2005) provides a declarative, object-oriented framework to visualize statistical information as a collection of objects. It is noted that this grammar is not a separate command language, nor is it exhaustive – it is “not designed to produce every graphic imaginable”. The grammar of graphics can be designed atop any programming language, yet most discussions in Graphics Group are around R, to the extent that a survey last year with Monash University’s NUMBATs group did not even provide an option for any other programming language for data visualization. However, it has been (recently) confirmed that graphics can exist without R, and so in this presentation, we shall have a quick look at statistical graphics packages in Python, and discuss their capabilities with respect to the well-known ggplot2 via a few illustrative examples.
Leland Wilkinson, The Grammar of Graphics (1st ed), 1999. ISBN 0-387-98774-6. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg.
Leland Wilkinson. The Grammar of Graphics (2nd ed), 2005. Springer-Verlag, Berlin, Heidelberg.