Plotly.Graph_objects.Scatter

Scatter plots are one of the most common plots when it comes to data visualization. In scatter plots, each data point is represented as a marker point specified by its location on the x and y-axis. In this article, we will understand how we can use the Plotly graph_objects module and the scatter class to create Scatter plots.”

Basic Scatter Plot With graph_objects

We can create a simple scatter plot by specifying the values of the x and y parameters in the scatter class.

An illustration is as shown:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=[0,1,2,3,4,5],
y=[0,1,4,9,16,25]
))
fig.show()

By default, Plotly will create a scatter plot with the markers connected with lines. An example figure is shown below:

To display the markers, we can use the mode parameters as shown in the code below:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=[0,1,2,3,4,5],
y=[0,1,4,9,16,25],
mode="markers"
))
fig.show()

Output:

You can also specify the scatter plot to display as lines by setting the mode to lines as shown:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=[0,1,2,3,4,5],
y=[0,1,4,9,16,25],
mode="lines"
))
fig.show()

Resulting output:

Setting Marker Color

We can set a custom color for the markers by specifying the marker_color parameter and the color as an rgb value.

For example:

import plotly.graph_objects as go
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=[0,1,2,3,4,5],
y=[0,1,4,9,16,25],
mode="markers+lines",
marker_color='rgb(152, 0, 123)'
))
fig.show()

Resulting figure:

You can also specify the color as an RGBA value.

Show Colorscale

We can also set the colorscale parameter to True allow Plotly to include the colorscale with the scatter plot.

import plotly.graph_objects as go
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=[0,1,2,3,4,5],
y=[0,1,4,9,16,25],
mode="markers+lines",
marker = dict(
colorscale='Plasma',
showscale=True
),
marker_color='rgb(152, 0, 123)',
))
fig.show()

Output:

Scatter Plot From a Dataset

We can also create a scatter plot using graph_objects from a dataset. For example, the code below creates a scatter plot from the iris() dataset.

import plotly.graph_objects as go
import plotly.express as px
df = px.data.iris()
fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=df['sepal_width'],
y=df['sepal_length'],
mode='markers'
))
fig.show()

The resulting scatter plot is as shown:

To set a color for the markers as a column within the DataFrame, we can run:

fig = go.Figure(data=go.Scatter(
x=df['sepal_width'],
y=df['sepal_length'],
mode='markers',
marker_color=df['species_id']
))

Keep in mind that the color should correspond to a numerical value that can be an interpreter of a specific color.

Result:

Conclusion

In this article, we explored the ways of creating scatter plots using the Scatter class from plotly graph_objects.