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Seaborn – Introduction

Seaborn is an open source, BSD-licensed Python library providing high level API for visualizing the data using Python programming language.

Audience

This tutorial takes you through the basics and various functions of Seaborn. It is specifically useful for people working on data analysis. After completing this tutorial, you will find yourself at a moderate level of expertise from where you can take yourself to higher levels of expertise.

Introduction

In the world of Analytics, the best way to get insights is by visualizing the data. Data can be visualized by representing it as plots which is easy to understand, explore and grasp. Such data helps in drawing the attention of key elements.

To analyse a set of data using Python, we make use of Matplotlib, a widely implemented 2D plotting library. Likewise, Seaborn is a visualization library in Python. It is built on top of Matplotlib.

Seaborn Vs Matplotlib

It is summarized that if Matplotlib “tries to make easy things easy and hard things possible”, Seaborn tries to make a well-defined set of hard things easy too.”

Seaborn helps resolve the two major problems faced by Matplotlib; the problems are −

  • Default Matplotlib parameters
  • Working with data frames

As Seaborn compliments and extends Matplotlib, the learning curve is quite gradual. If you know Matplotlib, you are already half way through Seaborn.

Important Features of Seaborn

Seaborn is built on top of Python’s core visualization library Matplotlib. It is meant to serve as a complement, and not a replacement. However, Seaborn comes with some very important features. Let us see a few of them here. The features help in −

  • Built in themes for styling matplotlib graphics
  • Visualizing univariate and bivariate data
  • Fitting in and visualizing linear regression models
  • Plotting statistical time series data
  • Seaborn works well with NumPy and Pandas data structures
  • It comes with built in themes for styling Matplotlib graphics

In most cases, you will still use Matplotlib for simple plotting. The knowledge of Matplotlib is recommended to tweak Seaborn’s default plots.

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