How to control the cell size of a pyplot pcolor heatmap?

Question

I have a pair of lists of numbers representing points in a 2-D space, and I want to represent the y/x ratios for these points as a 1-dimensional heatmap, with a diverging color map centered around 1, or the logs of my ratios, with a diverging color map centered around 0.

How do I do that?

My current attempt (borrowing somewhat from Heatmap in matplotlib with pcolor?):

from matplotlib import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# There must be a better way to generate arrays of random values
x_values = [np.random.random() for _ in range(10)]
y_values = [np.random.random() for _ in range(10)]
labels = list("abcdefghij")
ratios = np.asarray(y_values) / np.asarray(x_values)
axis = plt.gca()
# I transpose the array to get the points arranged vertically
heatmap = axis.pcolor(np.log2([ratios]).T, cmap=plt.cm.PuOr)
# Put labels left of the colour cells
axis.set_yticks(np.arange(len(labels)) + 0.5, minor=False)
# (Not sure I get the label order correct...)
axis.set_yticklabels(labels)
# I don't want ticks on the x-axis: this has no meaning here
axis.set_xticks([])
plt.show()

Some points I'm not satisfied with:

• The coloured cells I obtain are horizontally-elongated rectangles. I would like to control the width of these cells and obtain a column of cells.
• I would like to add a legend for the color map. heatmap.colorbar = plt.colorbar() fails with RuntimeError: No mappable was found to use for colorbar creation. First define a mappable such as an image (with imshow) or a contour set (with contourf).

One important point:

• matplotlib/pyplot always leaves me confused: there seems to be a lot of ways to do things and I get lost in the documentation. I never know what would be the "clean" way to do what I want: I welcome suggestions of reading material that would help me clarify my very approximative understanding of these things.

Answer 1

Just 2 more lines:

axis.set_aspect('equal') # X scale matches Y scale
plt.colorbar(mappable=heatmap) # Tells plt where it should find the color info.

Can't answer your final question very well. Part of it is due to we have two branches of doing things in matplotlib: the axis way (axis.do_something...) and the MATLAB clone way plt.some_plot_method. Unfortunately we can't change that, and it is a good feature for people to migrate into matplotlib. As far as the "Clean way" is concerned, I prefer to use whatever produces the shorter code. I guess that is inline with Python motto: Simple is better than complex and Readability counts.