How to plot one line in different colors

Question:

I have two list as below:

latt=[42.0,41.978567980875397,41.96622693388357,41.963791391892457,...,41.972407378075879]
lont=[-66.706920989908909,-66.703116557977069,-66.707351643324543,...-66.718218142021925]

now I want to plot this as a line, separate each 10 of those ‘latt’ and ‘lont’ records as a period and give it a unique color.
what should I do?

Asked By: wuwucat

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Answers:

See the answer here to generate the “periods” and then use the matplotlib scatter function as @tcaswell mentioned. Using the plot.hold function you can plot each period, colors will increment automatically.

Answered By: blazetopher

Copied from this example:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.collections import LineCollection
from matplotlib.colors import ListedColormap, BoundaryNorm

x = np.linspace(0, 3 * np.pi, 500)
y = np.sin(x)
z = np.cos(0.5 * (x[:-1] + x[1:]))  # first derivative

# Create a colormap for red, green and blue and a norm to color
# f' < -0.5 red, f' > 0.5 blue, and the rest green
cmap = ListedColormap(['r', 'g', 'b'])
norm = BoundaryNorm([-1, -0.5, 0.5, 1], cmap.N)

# Create a set of line segments so that we can color them individually
# This creates the points as a N x 1 x 2 array so that we can stack points
# together easily to get the segments. The segments array for line collection
# needs to be numlines x points per line x 2 (x and y)
points = np.array([x, y]).T.reshape(-1, 1, 2)
segments = np.concatenate([points[:-1], points[1:]], axis=1)

# Create the line collection object, setting the colormapping parameters.
# Have to set the actual values used for colormapping separately.
lc = LineCollection(segments, cmap=cmap, norm=norm)
lc.set_array(z)
lc.set_linewidth(3)

fig1 = plt.figure()
plt.gca().add_collection(lc)
plt.xlim(x.min(), x.max())
plt.ylim(-1.1, 1.1)

plt.show()
Answered By: ali_m

There are several different ways to do this. The “best” approach will depend mostly on how many line segments you want to plot.

If you’re just going to be plotting a handful (e.g. 10) line segments, then just do something like:

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def uniqueish_color():
    """There're better ways to generate unique colors, but this isn't awful."""
    return plt.cm.gist_ncar(np.random.random())

xy = (np.random.random((10, 2)) - 0.5).cumsum(axis=0)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
for start, stop in zip(xy[:-1], xy[1:]):
    x, y = zip(start, stop)
    ax.plot(x, y, color=uniqueish_color())
plt.show()

enter image description here

If you’re plotting something with a million line segments, though, this will be terribly slow to draw. In that case, use a LineCollection. E.g.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.collections import LineCollection

xy = (np.random.random((1000, 2)) - 0.5).cumsum(axis=0)

# Reshape things so that we have a sequence of:
# [[(x0,y0),(x1,y1)],[(x0,y0),(x1,y1)],...]
xy = xy.reshape(-1, 1, 2)
segments = np.hstack([xy[:-1], xy[1:]])

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
coll = LineCollection(segments, cmap=plt.cm.gist_ncar)
coll.set_array(np.random.random(xy.shape[0]))

ax.add_collection(coll)
ax.autoscale_view()

plt.show()

enter image description here

For both of these cases, we’re just drawing random colors from the “gist_ncar” coloramp. Have a look at the colormaps here (gist_ncar is about 2/3 of the way down): http://matplotlib.org/examples/color/colormaps_reference.html

Answered By: Joe Kington

Cribbing the color choice off of @JoeKington,

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

def uniqueish_color(n):
    """There're better ways to generate unique colors, but this isn't awful."""
    return plt.cm.gist_ncar(np.random.random(n))

plt.scatter(latt, lont, c=uniqueish_color(len(latt)))

You can do this with scatter.

Answered By: tacaswell

I have been searching for a short solution how to use pyplots line plot to show a time series coloured by a label feature without using scatter due to the amount of data points.

I came up with the following workaround:

plt.plot(np.where(df["label"]==1, df["myvalue"], None), color="red", label="1")
plt.plot(np.where(df["label"]==0, df["myvalue"], None), color="blue", label="0")
plt.legend()

The drawback is you are creating two different line plots so the connection between the different classes is not shown. For my purposes it is not a big deal. It may help someone.

Answered By: Andre S.
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