Plotly Python – An Interactive Data Visualization

Plotly Python is a library which helps in data visualisation in an interactive manner. But you might be wondering why do we need Plotly when we already have matplotlib which does the same thing. Plotly was created to make data more meaningful by having interactive charts and plots which could be created online as well. The fact that we could visualise data online removed a lot of hurdles which are associated with the offline usage of a library. However, Plotly can be used as both, an offline as well as online tool, thus giving us the best of both worlds.

How to install Plotly in Python

The great thing about Python is we can easily install most of the packages using the “pip” command. Thus, the Python code is as follows:

pip install plotly

You can use it in the Anaconda terminal as shown below:

If you want to check the version of plotly installed, you can use the following command

pip show plotly

You will find the output as shown below:


OHLC Chart

Initially we will use Yahoo finance to download the OHLC data of Tesla from 1st February 2020 to 3 March 2020.

The Python code for importing the libraries as well as the OHLC data is as follows

# Importing libraries
import yfinance as yf
import plotly as py
import plotly.graph_objects as go
import pandas as pd
# Import Tesla data
tesla = yf.download(‘TSLA’,’2020-02-01′, ‘2020-03-03’)

The Python code for plotting the OHLC data is given below:

fig = go.Figure(data=go.Ohlc(x=tesla.index, open=tesla.Open, high=tesla.High, low=tesla.Low, close=tesla.Close))
fig.show()

You can see the OHLC data plotted as follows:

To interact with the Chart and download the code, visit QuantInsti: https://blog.quantinsti.com/plotly-python/.
To edit the chart Plotly code, visit https://chart-studio.plot.ly/create/?fid=Quantra_Content:1#/

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