Creating a 1D heat map from a line graph

Question

Is it possible to create a 1D heat map from data in a line graph? i.e. I\'d like the highest values in y to represent the warmer colours in a heat map. I\'ve attached an example

Answer 1

If we assume that the data is equally spaced, one may use an imshow plot to recreate the plot from the question.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np; np.random.seed(1)
plt.rcParams["figure.figsize"] = 5,2

x = np.linspace(-3,3)
y = np.cumsum(np.random.randn(50))+6

fig, (ax,ax2) = plt.subplots(nrows=2, sharex=True)

extent = [x[0]-(x[1]-x[0])/2., x[-1]+(x[1]-x[0])/2.,0,1]
ax.imshow(y[np.newaxis,:], cmap="plasma", aspect="auto", extent=extent)
ax.set_yticks([])
ax.set_xlim(extent[0], extent[1])

ax2.plot(x,y)

plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()