Figure 5-17. Stacked histogram for two data sets
Another useful plot type is the boxplot. Similar to the histogram, the boxplot allows both a
concise overview of the characteristics of a data set and easy comparison of multiple data
sets. Figure 5-18 shows such a plot for our data set:
In [ 23 ]: fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=( 7 , 4 ))
plt.boxplot(y)
plt.grid(True)
plt.setp(ax, xticklabels=[‘1st’, ‘2nd’])
plt.xlabel(‘data set’)
plt.ylabel(‘value’)
plt.title(‘Boxplot’)
This last example uses the function plt.setp, which sets properties for a (set of) plotting
instance(s). For example, considering a line plot generated by:
line = plt.plot(data, ‘r’)
the following code:
plt.setp(line, linestyle=‘—’)
changes the style of the line to “dashed.” This way, you can easily change parameters after
the plotting instance (“artist object”) has been generated.
Figure 5-18. Boxplot for two data sets
As a final illustration in this section, we consider a mathematically inspired plot that can
also be found as an example in the gallery for matplotlib. It plots a function and
