Interactive matplotlib figures in Google Colab

Question

Normally in a jupyter notebook I would use %matplotlib notebook magic to display an interactive window, however this doesn't seem to work with google colab. Is there a solution, or is it not possible to display interactive windows in google colab?

Answer 1

Below is an example of creating interactive iplot() in Plotly and cufflinks() on Google Colab Notebook. Used functions and suggestions from the answer [1, 2]

The key seems to be to include configure_plotly_browser_state() in the cell that does the plotting.

Code below should work:

Import libraries

import datetime
from datetime import date
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from plotly import __version__
%matplotlib inline

import plotly.offline as pyo
import plotly.graph_objs as go
from plotly.offline import iplot

import cufflinks as cf
from plotly.offline import download_plotlyjs, init_notebook_mode, plot, iplot 


cf.go_offline()

Set notebook to false

init_notebook_mode(connected=False)

Create function for Colab copied from: [1, 2]

def configure_plotly_browser_state():
  import IPython
  display(IPython.core.display.HTML('''
        <script src="/static/components/requirejs/require.js"></script>
        <script>
          requirejs.config({
            paths: {
              base: '/static/base',
              plotly: 'https://cdn.plot.ly/plotly-1.5.1.min.js?noext',
            },
          });
        </script>
        '''))

Create sample dataframe

Data source: Annual rainfuall data for the Peachtree City, GA from National Weather Service [3].

df = pd.DataFrame({
    'month': ['January', 'February', 'March', 'April', 'May', 'June', 'July', 'August', 'September', 'October', 'November', 'December'],
    'Year_2018': [3.26, 6.11, 4.86, 6.53, 4.45, 3.86, 8.04, 7.59, 1.48, 4.75, 7.27, 11.83],
    'Year_1996': [8.26, 3.82, 6.42, 2.91, 2.12, 1.70, 2.14, 4.66, 4.32, 0.89, 3.22, 4.14]
}
)
df

Create an interactive iplot

configure_plotly_browser_state()
df.iplot(kind='line',x='month',y=['Year_2018', 'Year_1996'], color=['white', 'gold'], 
theme='solar', mode='markers+lines',title='Annual Rainfall in the city Peachtree City, GA')
plt.show()

Output:

[Note: The x, y, titles do not show up! at the moment.]