DVS Workshop: Python for Data Science: Visualization with Altair

While Python is my preferred programming language for scripted data transformations, I have avoided routinely doing data visualization in Python. I could follow examples for the many Python visualization libraries, but in the end they all seemed confusing and made it hard to do the types of exploratory visualization that Tableau made easy. Finally, Altair has emerged as a viable alternative for me, because of the way it "thinks about" data and the visualization process.Altair is a declarative statistical visualization library for Python, built on top of the well-design and powerful Vega-Lite visualization grammar. (Vega-lite was built for the web, includes interaction, and is being adopted as a standard by high profile websites and tools.) It works well for small to medium-sized tabular data (like spreadsheets). In this workshop, I'll run you through both some introductory and some more complex examples using Altair with Python in Jupyter notebooks, so you can get a feeling for how you might use it in your own work.