Interactive plotting in Jupyter results in subsequent plots being appended

Question

I am trying to make an interactive plot in Jupyter, and it works somewhat with one problem, which is that every time I hit the button to generate a plot, a new plot is appended instead of the current one being replaced. Any ideas on how to fix this problem?

field_ddl = widgets.Dropdown(
    options=['race', 'gender', 'grade'],
    value='race',
    description='field:',
    disabled=False,
    button_style='info'
)
graph_btn = widgets.Button(
    description='graph',
    disabled=False,
    button_style='success',
    tooltip='distribution plot',
    icon='check'
)

def graph_btn_clicked(e):
    field = field_ddl.value
    df[field].value_counts().plot(kind='bar', title=field)

graph_btn.on_click(graph_btn_clicked)

display(field_ddl)
display(graph_btn)

I've looked up the interact feature, but that doesn't seem to help. Upon initialization, a graph is produced, but when the I select another field and hit the button again, nothing happens.

interact(graph_btn_clicked, x=graph_btn)

I guess it's the same issue as in this question: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/44329068/jupyter-notebook-interactive-plot-with-widgets — ImportanceOfBeingErnest, Jun 07 '17 at 16:29

score 3 · Answer 1 · answered Jun 07 '17 at 16:35

3

You may use the interactive backend

%matplotlib notebook

Then create a figure and an axes to plot to,

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

Then each time the button is clicked, clear the old plot and plot the new to the same axes.

def graph_btn_clicked(e):
    field = field_ddl.value
    ax.clear()
    df[field].value_counts().plot(kind='bar', title=field, ax=ax)

answered Jun 07 '17 at 16:35

ImportanceOfBeingErnest

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`%matplotlib notebook` seems to conflict with `%matplotlib inline`. With this approach, would I have to switch between the two as needed? – Jane Wayne Jun 07 '17 at 17:00

Interactive plotting in Jupyter results in subsequent plots being appended

1 Answers1