Generate a heatmap in MatPlotLib using a scatter data set

Question

I have a set of X,Y data points (about 10k) that are easy to plot as a scatter plot but that I would like to represent as a heatmap.

I looked through the examples in

Answer 1

Instead of using np.hist2d, which in general produces quite ugly histograms, I would like to recycle py-sphviewer, a python package for rendering particle simulations using an adaptive smoothing kernel and that can be easily installed from pip (see webpage documentation). Consider the following code, which is based on the example:

import numpy as np
import numpy.random
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import sphviewer as sph

def myplot(x, y, nb=32, xsize=500, ysize=500):   
    xmin = np.min(x)
    xmax = np.max(x)
    ymin = np.min(y)
    ymax = np.max(y)

    x0 = (xmin+xmax)/2.
    y0 = (ymin+ymax)/2.

    pos = np.zeros([3, len(x)])
    pos[0,:] = x
    pos[1,:] = y
    w = np.ones(len(x))

    P = sph.Particles(pos, w, nb=nb)
    S = sph.Scene(P)
    S.update_camera(r='infinity', x=x0, y=y0, z=0, 
                    xsize=xsize, ysize=ysize)
    R = sph.Render(S)
    R.set_logscale()
    img = R.get_image()
    extent = R.get_extent()
    for i, j in zip(xrange(4), [x0,x0,y0,y0]):
        extent[i] += j
    print extent
    return img, extent

fig = plt.figure(1, figsize=(10,10))
ax1 = fig.add_subplot(221)
ax2 = fig.add_subplot(222)
ax3 = fig.add_subplot(223)
ax4 = fig.add_subplot(224)


# Generate some test data
x = np.random.randn(1000)
y = np.random.randn(1000)

#Plotting a regular scatter plot
ax1.plot(x,y,'k.', markersize=5)
ax1.set_xlim(-3,3)
ax1.set_ylim(-3,3)

heatmap_16, extent_16 = myplot(x,y, nb=16)
heatmap_32, extent_32 = myplot(x,y, nb=32)
heatmap_64, extent_64 = myplot(x,y, nb=64)

ax2.imshow(heatmap_16, extent=extent_16, origin='lower', aspect='auto')
ax2.set_title("Smoothing over 16 neighbors")

ax3.imshow(heatmap_32, extent=extent_32, origin='lower', aspect='auto')
ax3.set_title("Smoothing over 32 neighbors")

#Make the heatmap using a smoothing over 64 neighbors
ax4.imshow(heatmap_64, extent=extent_64, origin='lower', aspect='auto')
ax4.set_title("Smoothing over 64 neighbors")

plt.show()

which produces the following image:

As you see, the images look pretty nice, and we are able to identify different substructures on it. These images are constructed spreading a given weight for every point within a certain domain, defined by the smoothing length, which in turns is given by the distance to the closer nb neighbor (I've chosen 16, 32 and 64 for the examples). So, higher density regions typically are spread over smaller regions compared to lower density regions.

The function myplot is just a very simple function that I've written in order to give the x,y data to py-sphviewer to do the magic.