What are errors on line plots?

Scatter plots are used to show the values of discrete data, and line plots are used to show the values of continuous data where ‘in-between’ values can be interpolated.

Similarly, point estimates show uncertainty at one point while confidence bands show uncertainty over a range of points.

For line plots, confidence bands are preferable.

To draw confidence bands in Matplotlib, we make use of the Axes.fill_between method. This takes at least two arguments, but to draw error bands we’ll use it with three.

1. The first argument is a sequence of x-positions of a curve.
2. The second and third are corresponding y-positions of the curve. The area between these two y-positions will be filled in.

As an aside, if we call the ‘fill_between‘ method with only two arguments, the area between the curve and the x-axis will be filled.

Demonstration: errors on line plots

For this dataset, we use a temperatures in New York for the first week of June 2016.

Step 1

First, let us import the date class from the ‘datetime’ module.

Code:

from datetime import date

Step 2

We then draw the figure and axes for the plot we are intending to display.

Code:
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
fig.set_size_inches(12, 8)

Step 3

We then read the NewYorkHourly.csv on the Notebook, parsing the dates and columns.

Code:

weather_data = pd.read_csv("New_York_Hourly.csv",
 parse_dates=[["date", "TimeEST"]],
 usecols=["date", "TimeEST", "TemperatureF", "Dew PointF", "Humidity"]
 )
june_weather = weather_data[
 (weather_data["date_TimeEST"] >= '2016-06-01') & (weather_data["date_TimeEST"] < '2016-06-08')
].sort_values("date_TimeEST")

Step 4

We don’t have any actual data for what sort of error there might be in the data, so we’ll generate some by assuming there might be a ±5% error for any data point.

Code:

error_min = june_weather["TemperatureF"] * 0.95
error_max = june_weather["TemperatureF"] * 1.05

Step 5

We plot the figure so far with the code snippet below.

Code:

ax.plot(june_weather["date_TimeEST"], june_weather["TemperatureF"])
ax.set_xlabel("Date")
ax.set_ylabel("Temperature (ºF)")
fig

Output:

Click to enlarge

Step 6

Then, we just fill between those two points using the x-values from the original data (the date and time).

Code:

ax.fill_between(june_weather["date_TimeEST"], error_min, error_max, color="red", alpha=0.1)

The colour of the band is set with the color argument, and we set 10% opacity by setting the alpha to 0.1.

Output:

Click to enlarge

In the output, you can see how the colours are distributed along the line plot to depict probability.

There are more ways to use the fill_between method, and you can read more about it at the official documentation in the link here: Fill_between documentation [1]

References

1. matplotlib.pyplot.fill_between [Document]. Matplotlib; 2020. Available from: https://matplotlib.org/3.1.1/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.pyplot.fill_between.html