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Mastering Plotly and Dash Data Visualization with Python

Adding Customised Sliders

Learn what sliders are and how to use them in Plotly to subset data and add interactivity.

We'll cover the following...

Our data

Here we explore the baseball dataset that contain important statistics in the columns seen below:

Python 3.8
# Import libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
# Import datasets
baseball = pd.read_csv('/usr/local/csvfiles//regular_season_batting.csv')
print(baseball.head())

Custom sliders in Plotly Express

When creating a custom slider in Plotly Express, we can use the animation_frame argument, which sets the slider values to the corresponding pandas series.

In this example, we plot a baseball player’s Batting Average against their On Base Percentage. We then set the animation_frame to "Year" to accentuate that we wish to have slider values for each year so that we can observe how the dispersion of the data in a bivariate sense changes over time.

We have also allowed some extra hover information to be shown and have set the range_x and range_y as a list with the minimum and maximum x and y bounds, respectively.

Python 3.8
# Import libraries
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import plotly.express as px
import plotly.graph_objects as go
from plotly.subplots import make_subplots
# Import datasets
baseball = pd.read_csv('/usr/local/csvfiles/batting_stats.csv')
# Set our margin
margin = 0.01
# Create figure
fig = px.scatter(baseball, x='On Base Percentage', y='Batting Average', 
                 animation_frame="Year",
                 color_discrete_sequence=['black'],
                 hover_name='Name',
                 hover_data=['On Base Percentage', 'Batting Average', 'Year', 'Position'],
                 
                 # Here we ensure that all scatter points get shown for each year (so that none are snipped off the graph)
                 range_x=[baseball['On Base Percentage'].min() - margin, baseball['On Base Percentage'].max() + margin],
                 range_y=[baseball['Batting Average'].min() - margin,baseball['Batting Average'].max() + margin])
# Set marker size the plotly express way
fig.update_traces(marker_size=12)
fig.update_layout(title='On Base Percentage vs Batting Average')
# Show
fig.show()

Removing animation functionality

By running the following code, we notice that the type of our Plotly Express figure is that of plotly.graph_objs._figure.Figure.

type(fig)

We get the following:

plotly.graph_objs._figure.Figure

With these figure objects, we can then observe certain aspects of our graph, one being the complete "layout" of our figure, which we can then observe with dictionary-like syntax.

The output for this is quite large, but the key is noted below:

    'updatemenus': [{'buttons': [{'args':
...