Why is my notebook crashing when I run this for loop and what is the fix? - python-3.x

Question

I have taken code in relation to the Kalman Filter and am attempting to iterate through each column of data. What I would like to have happen is:
The column data is fed into the filter
The filtered column data (xhat) is placed into another DataFrame (filtered)
The filtered column data (xhat) is used to produce a visual.
I have created a for loop to iterate through the column data, but when I run the cell, I crash the notebook. When it doesn't crash, I get this warning:
C:\Users\perso\Anaconda3\envs\learn-env\lib\site-packages\ipykernel_launcher.py:45: RuntimeWarning: More than 20 figures have been opened. Figures created through the pyplot interface (`matplotlib.pyplot.figure`) are retained until explicitly closed and may consume too much memory. (To control this warning, see the rcParam `figure.max_open_warning`).
Thanks in advance for any help. I hope this question is detailed enough. I bombed on the last one.
'''A Python implementation of the example given in pages 11-15 of "An
Introduction to the Kalman Filter" by Greg Welch and Gary Bishop,
University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Department of Computer
Science, TR 95-041,
https://www.cs.unc.edu/~welch/media/pdf/kalman_intro.pdf'''
# by Andrew D. Straw
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# dataframe created to hold filtered data
filtered = pd.DataFrame()
# intial parameters
for column in data:
n_iter = len(data.index) #number of iterations equal to sample numbers
sz = (n_iter,) # size of array
z = data[column] # observations
Q = 1e-5 # process variance
# allocate space for arrays
xhat=np.zeros(sz) # a posteri estimate of x
P=np.zeros(sz) # a posteri error estimate
xhatminus=np.zeros(sz) # a priori estimate of x
Pminus=np.zeros(sz) # a priori error estimate
K=np.zeros(sz) # gain or blending factor
R = 1.0**2 # estimate of measurement variance, change to see effect
# intial guesses
xhat[0] = z[0]
P[0] = 1.0
for k in range(1,n_iter):
# time update
xhatminus[k] = xhat[k-1]
Pminus[k] = P[k-1]+Q
# measurement update
K[k] = Pminus[k]/( Pminus[k]+R )
xhat[k] = xhatminus[k]+K[k]*(z[k]-xhatminus[k])
P[k] = (1-K[k])*Pminus[k]
# add new data to created dataframe
filtered.assign(a = [xhat])
#create visualization of noise reduction
plt.rcParams['figure.figsize'] = (10, 8)
plt.figure()
plt.plot(z,'k+',label='noisy measurements')
plt.plot(xhat,'b-',label='a posteri estimate')
plt.legend()
plt.title('Estimate vs. iteration step', fontweight='bold')
plt.xlabel('column data')
plt.ylabel('Measurement')

Answer 1

This seems like a pretty straightforward error. The warning indicates that you have attempted to plot more figures than the current limit before a warning is created (a parameter you can change but which by default is set to 20). This is because in each iteration of your for loop, you create a new figure. Depending on the size of n_iter, you are opening potentially hundreds or thousands of figures. Each of these figures takes resources to generate and show, so you are creating a very large resource load on your system. Either it is processing very slowly due or is crashing altogether. In any case, the solution is to plot fewer figures.
I don't know exactly what you're plotting in your loop but it seems like each iteration of your loop corresponds to one time step and at each time step you'd like to plot the estimated and actual values. In this case, you need to define a figure and figure options once, outside of the loop, rather than at each iteration. But a better way to do this is probably to generate all of the data you want to plot ahead of time and store it in an easy-to-plot datatype like lists, then plot it once at the end.