Python Data Visualization Transcripts
Chapter: Altair
Lecture: Vega lite
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I'm gonna go through a little bit of what altair does behind the scenes because I think it will help you understand how to use altair most effectively.
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And when we talk about installing some of the packages and other ways that altair works it will all make a little more sense.
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Here's some simple code that generates an altair scatter plot and I'll go into it a little bit more detail to explain what happens.
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But behind the scenes, after you create this code,
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the altair package then converts this into a Json representation of your visualization using the vega
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lite spec. And you can look at this specifications and see that a lot of the information that you pass in,
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that python code gets translated into a pretty much 1 to 1 mapping in to the specification. Once that specification is complete,
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it calls the javascript library to render the visualization. So all of this happens behind the scenes. And like I said, as you start to get into this,
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it is helpful to understand what the process is and as you start to troubleshoot and figure out how to get your data to work,
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it's useful to understand the underlying vega lite specs so you can reference that if you need to for more complex visualizations.