Animated graphs in ipython notebook

Question

Is there a way of creating animated graphs. For example showing the same graph, with different parameters.

For example is SAGE notebook, one can write:

Answer 1

matplotlib has an animation module to do just that. However, examples provided on the site will not run as is in a notebook; you need to make a few tweaks to make it work.

Here is the example of the page below modified to work in a notebook (modifications in bold).

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.animation import FuncAnimation
from matplotlib import rc
from IPython.display import HTML

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
xdata, ydata = [], []
ln, = plt.plot([], [], 'ro', animated=True)

def init():
    ax.set_xlim(0, 2*np.pi)
    ax.set_ylim(-1, 1)
    return ln,

def update(frame):
    xdata.append(frame)
    ydata.append(np.sin(frame))
    ln.set_data(xdata, ydata)
    return ln,

ani = FuncAnimation(fig, update, frames=np.linspace(0, 2*np.pi, 128),
                    init_func=init, blit=True)
rc('animation', html='html5')
ani
# plt.show() # not needed anymore

Note that the animation in the notebook is made via a movie and that you need to have ffmpeg installed and matplotlib configured to use it.