plotly-interactive-visualization

# Plotly — Interactive Scientific Visualization ## Overview Plotly is a Python graphing library for interactive, web-embeddable visualizations with 40+ chart types. It provides two APIs: Plotly Express (high-level, pandas-native) for quick plots and Graph Objects (low-level) for full customization. Output to interactive HTML, static PNG/PDF/SVG, or Dash web apps. ## When to Use - Creating interactive charts with hover tooltips, zoom, and pan - Building multi-panel exploratory dashboards for data analysis - Visualizing 3D data (surfaces, scatter3d, mesh, volume) - Making geographic/map visualizations (choropleth, scatter_geo) - Presenting data in web-embeddable HTML format - Statistical distribution comparison (violin, box, histogram with marginals) - Time series with range sliders and animation frames - For **static publication-quality figures** (journal submissions), use `matplotlib` instead - For **statistical grammar-of-graphics** style, use `seaborn` instead ## Prerequisites - **Python packages**: `plotly`, `pandas`, `numpy` - **For static export**: `kaleido` (PNG/PDF/SVG rendering) - **For web apps**: `dash` (optional) ```bash pip install plotly kaleido ``` ## Quick Start ```python import plotly.express as px import pandas as pd import numpy as np # Sample data np.random.seed(42) df = pd.DataFrame({ "x": np.random.randn(200), "y": np.random.randn(200), "group": np.random.choice(["A", "B", "C"], 200), "size": np.random.uniform(5, 20, 200), }) fi...