YTEP-0021: Particle-Only Plots

Abstract

Created: August 29, 2014 Author: Andrew Myers

This YTEP describes a mechanism for creating scatter plots of particle fields in yt. It was prompted by a question posted to the yt-users list by Jeremy Ritter, linked below. Essentially, it proposes creating a user-facing function called ParticlePlot (analagous to SlicePlot or ProfilePlot) that facilitates plotting arbitrary particle fields against one another.

Status

Completed

Detailed Description

Currently, to make plots like those in the linked notebooks, you would have to grab the particle data from the data source and feed them to something like pyplot.plot(). Instead of units, labels, and log_scales getting grabbed from the FieldInfoContainer, they would need to be set up manually. Furthermore, the standardized interface for modifying yt plots that exists in PlotWindow would not be available.

Instead, we could create a ParticlePlot class that would act like the currently existing yt plotting classes. The constructor would take:

  • data_source: an AMR3DData object
  • x_fields: str or list, the field(s) to put on the x-axis
  • y_fields: str or list, same but for the y-axis
  • color: either a color string, or another particle field to be mapped to a color scale

If x_fields and y_fields are strings, this would add a single scatter plot to the ParticlePlot. If they are lists of field_names, then a series of plots will be added, in the style of (for example) PhasePlot. The standard methods for modifying these plots (e.g. set_log, set_units, set_cmap, etc. ) should all work as expected, and they should be able to be saved / sent to the notebook as normal.

Implementation Details

My current implementation wraps pyplot.plot(), but because pyplot.plot can be slow when the number of points is large, ParticlePlot should instead use Sam Skillman’s particle splatting code to create something like a FixedResolutionBuffer. This could then be displayed with pyplot.imshow(). This would also make it easy for users to access the raw image and pass it to another plotting routine, if they prefer.

Inheritance Structure

ParticlePlot shares a lot of its functionality with PhasePlot, so the implementation should be similar. In particular, ParticlePlot should inherit from ImagePlotContainer and the individual plots in it should be ParticlePlotMPL objects that inherit from ImagePlotMPL.

Open issues

Plots that have spatial variables on both axes are logically different from those that don’t in a few ways. For instance, it could be misleading if the aspect ratios are different for two spatial axes, as in the second linked notebook. Also, things like “pan” and “zoom” make sense for spatial data, but not when plotting, say, velocity versus position. Should we handle spatial plots differently, as Nathan suggested in the yt-dev discussion above? Spatial plots could in inherit from PlotWindow to take advantage of all the methods and callbacks in there.

Backwards Compatibility

None; all existing code should work exactly as before.

Alternatives

Alternatively, there could be no mechanism for making particle scatter plots inside of yt, and users could call pyplot.plot() or whatever directly.