View Source Tucan

Actions Status Package Documentation

Tucan is an Elixir plotting library built on top of VegaLite, designed to simplify the creation of interactive and visually stunning plots. With Tucan, you can effortlessly generate a wide range of plots, from simple bar charts to complex composite plots, all while enjoying the power and flexibility of a clean composable functional API.

Tucan offers a simple API for creating most common plot types similarly to matplotlib and seaborn without requiring the end user to be familiar with the Vega Lite grammar.

Tucan

Features

  • Versatile Plot Types - Tucan provides an array of plot types, including bar charts, line plots, scatter plots, histograms, and more, allowing you to effectively represent diverse data sets.
  • Clean and consistent API - A clean and consistent plotting API similar to matplotlib or seaborn is provided. You should be able to create most common plots with a single function call and minimal configuration.
  • Grouping and Faceting - Enhance your visualizations with grouping and faceting features, enabling you to examine patterns and trends within subgroups of your data.
  • Customization - Customize your plots with ease using Tucan's utilities for adjusting plot dimensions, titles, and themes.
  • Thin wrapper on top of VegaLite - All VegaLite functions can be used seamlessly with Tucan in order to enhance/customize your plots.
  • Nx support - You can pass directly Nx tensors in all plot functions.
  • Low level API - A low level API with helper functions is provided for modifying VegaLite specifications.

Basic usage 

# A simple scatter plot
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")

# You can combine it with one or more semantic grouping functions
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")
|> Tucan.color_by("species")
|> Tucan.shape_by("species")

# You can pipe it through other Tucan functions to modify the look & feel
Tucan.bubble(:gapminder, "income", "health", "population",
  color_by: "region",
  tooltip: true
)
|> Tucan.set_width(400)
|> Tucan.Axes.set_x_title("Gdp per Capita")
|> Tucan.Axes.set_y_title("Life expectancy")
|> Tucan.Scale.set_x_scale(:log)

# Some composite plots are also supported
fields = ["petal_width", "petal_length", "sepal_width", "sepal_length"]

Tucan.pairplot(:iris, , width: 130, height: 130)
|> Tucan.color_by("species", recursive: true)

# creating facet plots is very easy with the facet_by/4 function
Tucan.scatter(:iris, "petal_width", "petal_length")
|> Tucan.facet_by(:column, "species")
|> Tucan.color_by("species")

Read the docs for more examples.

Installation

Inside Livebook

You most likely want to use Tucan in Livebook, in which case you can call Mix.install/2:

Mix.install([
  {:tucan, "~> 0.3.0"},
  {:kino_vega_lite, "~> 0.1.8"}
])

You will also want kino_vega_lite to ensure Livebook renders the graphics nicely.

In Mix projects

You can add the :tucan dependency to your mix.exs:

def deps do
  [
    {:tucan, "~> 0.3.0"}
  ]
end

NOTE: While I will try to maintain backwards compatibility as much as possible, since this is still a 0.x.x project the API is not considered stable and thus subject to possible breaking changes up until v1.0.0.

Acknowledgements

  • vega-lite and the awesome docs of it, many examples and most of the datasets used are based on it.
  • The elixir VegaLite bindings
  • seaborn, matplotlib and ggplot2 upon which the high level API is partially based.
  • vega-themes from which the existing themes are ported.

License

Copyright (c) 2023 Panagiotis Nezis

Tucan is released under the MIT License. See the LICENSE file for more details.