Why is Jupyter Notebook creating duplicate plots when making updating plots

Question

I'm trying to make plots in a Jupyter Notebook that update every second or so. Right now, I just have a simple code which is working:

%matplotlib inline
import time
import pylab as plt
import numpy as np
from IPython import display

for i in range(10):
    plt.close()
    a = np.random.randint(100,size=100)
    b = np.random.randint(100,size=100)

    fig, ax = plt.subplots(2,1)
    ax[0].plot(a)
    ax[0].set_title('A')
    ax[1].plot(b)
    ax[1].set_title('B')

    display.clear_output(wait=True)
    display.display(plt.gcf())
    time.sleep(1.0)

Which updated the plots I have created every second. However, at the end, there is an extra copy of the plots:

Why is it doing this? And how can I make this not happen? Thank you in advance.

There is a hint of this on this question: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/34486642/what-is-the-currently-correct-way-to-dynamically-update-plots-in-jupyter-ipython?rq=1 — roadrunner66, Apr 18 '16 at 03:56

score 14 · Accepted Answer · answered Apr 18 '16 at 03:57

The inline backend is set-up so that when each cell is finished executing, any matplotlib plot created in the cell will be displayed.

You are displaying your figure once using the display function, and then the figure is being displayed again automatically by the inline backend.

The easiest way to prevent this is to add plt.close() at the end of the code in your cell.

score 7 · Answer 2 · answered May 18 '21 at 14:53

7

Another alternative would be to add ; at the end of the line! I am experiencing the same issue with statsmodels methods to plot the autocorrelation of a time series (statsmodels.graphics.tsaplot.plot_acf()):

from statsmodels.graphics.tsaplots import plot_acf

plot_acf(daily_outflow["count"]);

answered May 18 '21 at 14:53

baggiponte

547
6
13

This solution work for Jupyter Notebook with Pycharm – mpx Sep 18 '21 at 14:47

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Nov 09 '22 at 08:24

0

Despite using %matplotlib inline, it's not working for some libraries, such as statsmodels. I recommend always use plt.show() at the end of your code.

answered Nov 09 '22 at 08:24

Mehdi

999
13
11

Why is Jupyter Notebook creating duplicate plots when making updating plots

3 Answers3

Linked