Interactive selection of series in a matplotlib plot

Question

I have been looking for a way to be able to select which series are visible on a plot, after a plot is created.

I need this as i often have plots with many series. t

Answer 1

A list with checkboxes will be fine if you have a few plots or less, but for more plots a popup menu would probably be better. I am not sure whether either of these is possible with matplotlib though.

The way I implemented this once was to use a slider to select the plot from a list - basically you use the slider to set the index of the series that should be shown. I had a few hundred series per dataset, so it was a good way to quickly glance through them.

My code for setting this up was roughly like this:

fig = pyplot.figure()
slax = self.fig.add_axes((0.1,0.05,0.35,0.05))
sl = matplotlib.widgets.Slider(slax, "Trace #", 0, len(plotlist), valinit=0.0)
def update_trace():
    ax.clear()
    tracenum = int(np.floor(sl.val))
    ax.plot(plotlist[tracenum])
    fig.canvas.draw()
sl.on_changed(update_trace)
ax = self.fig.add_axes((0.6, 0.2, 0.35, 0.7))
fig.add_subplot(axes=self.traceax)
update_trace()

Here's an example: