Plotly Express is the built-in high-level data visualization interface for Plotly.py, a leading interactive data visualization library for Python. With today’s release of Plotly.py 4.8, Plotly Express now gracefully operates on wide-form and mixed-form data – not just “tidy” long-form data.

These new capabilities dramatically expand Plotly Express’ promise of ‘interactive data visualization in a single Python statement’, by removing the need to wrangle your data into a particular form before plotting.

When we first released Plotly Express in March of last year, it supported only “tidy” long-form Pandas data frames as input, and our early adopters quickly asked about wide-form support. Since then we’ve added support for non-data-frame array-like inputs such as NumPy arrays and Pandas series and indexes; for GeoJSON-formatted geographical data; for hierarchical part-of-whole data; and for image and multi-dimensional xarray data. Today we are finally able to deliver to our users and customers some capabilities they’ve been asking for from the beginning. It took weeks of refactoring and fine-tuning of defaults, but I’m very proud of the outcome: Plotly Express’s wide-form support is flexible, expressive and totally consistent with the rest of its API.

#open-source #python #data-analysis #data-visualization #data-science