Hexagonal binned plot

hexbin is a 2D histogram plot, in which the bins are hexagons and the color represents the number of data points within each bin.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# Fixing random state for reproducibility
np.random.seed(19680801)

n = 100_000
x = np.random.standard_normal(n)
y = 2.0 + 3.0 * x + 4.0 * np.random.standard_normal(n)
xlim = x.min(), x.max()
ylim = y.min(), y.max()

fig, (ax0, ax1) = plt.subplots(ncols=2, sharey=True, figsize=(9, 4))

hb = ax0.hexbin(x, y, gridsize=50, cmap='inferno')
ax0.set(xlim=xlim, ylim=ylim)
ax0.set_title("Hexagon binning")
cb = fig.colorbar(hb, ax=ax0, label='counts')

hb = ax1.hexbin(x, y, gridsize=50, bins='log', cmap='inferno')
ax1.set(xlim=xlim, ylim=ylim)
ax1.set_title("With a log color scale")
cb = fig.colorbar(hb, ax=ax1, label='log10(N)')

plt.show()

References

The use of the following functions, methods, classes and modules is shown in this example:

• matplotlib.axes.Axes.hexbin / matplotlib.pyplot.hexbin