Plotting an Obscure Python Graph

Question

I've been trying to work through an interesting problem but have had difficulty finding a proper solution. I am trying to plot columns of heatmaps, with each column potentially varying in row size. The data structure I currently have consists of a nested list, where each list contains various heat values for their points. I'll attach an image below to make this clear.

At this time we have mostly tried to make matplotlib to work, however we haven't been able to produce any of the results we want. Please let me know if you have any idea on what steps we should take next.

Thanks

Answer 1

I think the basic strategy would be to transform your initial array so that you have a rectangular array with the missing values coded as NaN. Then you can simply use imshow to display the heatmap.

I used np.pad to fill the missing values

data = [[0,0,1],[1,0,5,6,0]]
N_cols = len(data)
N_lines = np.max([len(a) for a in data])
data2 = np.array([np.pad(np.array(a, dtype=float), (0,N_lines-len(a)), mode='constant', constant_values=np.nan) for a in data])

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
im = ax.imshow(data2.T, cmap='viridis')
plt.colorbar(im)