How to iterate a list of list for a scatter plot and create a legend of unique elements - python-3.x

Question

Background:
I have a list_of_x_and_y_list that contains x and y values which looks like:
[[(44800, 14888), (132000, 12500), (40554, 12900)], [(None, 193788), (101653, 78880), (3866, 160000)]]
I have another data_name_list ["data_a","data_b"] so that
"data_a" = [(44800, 14888), (132000, 12500), (40554, 12900)]
"data_b" = [(None, 193788), (101653, 78880), (3866, 160000)]
The len of list_of_x_and_y_list / or len of data_name_list is > 20.
Question:
How can I create a scatter plot for each item (being the same colour) in the data_name_list?
What I have tried:
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax = plt.axes(facecolor='#FFFFFF')
prop_cycle = plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']
colors = prop_cycle.by_key()['color']
print(list_of_x_and_y_list)
for x_and_y_list, data_name, color in zip(list_of_x_and_y_list, data_name_list, colors):
for x_and_y in x_and_y_list,:
print(x_and_y)
x, y = x_and_y
ax.scatter(x, y, label=data_name, color=color) # "label=data_name" creates
# a huge list as a legend!
# :(
plt.title('Matplot scatter plot')
plt.legend(loc=2)
file_name = "3kstc.png"
fig.savefig(file_name, dpi=fig.dpi)
print("Generated: {}".format(file_name))
The Problem:
The legend appears to be a very long list, which I don't know how to rectify:
Relevant Research:
Matplotlib scatterplot
Scatter Plot
Scatter plot in Python using matplotlib

Answer 1

The reason you get a long repeated list as a legend is because you are providing each point as a separate series, as matplotlib does not automatically group your data based on the labels.
A quick fix is to iterate over the list and zip together the x-values and the y-values of each series as two tuples, so that the x tuple contains all the x-values and the y tuple the y-values.
Then you can feed these tuples to the plt.plot method together with the labels.
I felt that the names list_of_x_and_y_list were uneccessary long and complicated, so in my code I've used shorter names.
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data_series = [[(44800, 14888), (132000, 12500), (40554, 12900)],
[(None, 193788), (101653, 78880), (3866, 160000)]]
data_names = ["data_a","data_b"]
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax = plt.axes(facecolor='#FFFFFF')
prop_cycle = plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle']
colors = prop_cycle.by_key()['color']
for data, data_name, color in zip(data_series, data_names, colors):
x,y = zip(*data)
ax.scatter(x, y, label=data_name, color=color)
plt.title('Matplot scatter plot')
plt.legend(loc=1)

Answer 2

To only get one entry per data_name, you should add data_name only once as a label. The rest of the calls should go with label=None.
The simplest you can achieve this using the current code, is to set data_name to None at the end of the loop:
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
from random import randint
fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
ax.set_facecolor('#FFFFFF')
# create some random data, suppose the sublists have different lengths
list_of_x_and_y_list = [[(randint(1000, 4000), randint(2000, 5000)) for col in range(randint(2, 10))]
for row in range(10)]
data_name_list = list('abcdefghij')
colors = plt.rcParams['axes.prop_cycle'].by_key()['color']
for x_and_y_list, data_name, color in zip(list_of_x_and_y_list, data_name_list, colors):
for x_and_y in x_and_y_list :
x, y = x_and_y
ax.scatter(x, y, label=data_name, color=color)
data_name = None
plt.legend(loc=2)
plt.show()
Some things can be simplified, making the code 'more pythonic', for example:
for x_and_y in x_and_y_list :
x, y = x_and_y
can be written as:
for x, y in x_and_y_list:
Another issue, is that with a lot of data calling scatter for every point could be rather slow. All the x and y belonging to the same list can be plotted together. For example using list comprehension:
for x_and_y_list, data_name, color in zip(list_of_x_and_y_list, data_name_list, colors):
xs = [x for x, y in x_and_y_list]
ys = [y for x, y in x_and_y_list]
ax.scatter(xs, ys, label=data_name, color=color)
scatter could even get a list of colors per point, but plotting all the points in one go, wouldn't allow for labels per data_name.
Very often, numpy is used to store numerical data. This has some advantages, such as vectorization for quick calculations. With numpy the code would look like:
import numpy as np
for x_and_y_list, data_name, color in zip(list_of_x_and_y_list, data_name_list, colors):
xys = np.array(x_and_y_list)
ax.scatter(xys[:,0], xys[:,1], label=data_name, color=color)