Matplotlib Filling in Lines for Some Reason

Community
1

Hi there,

For some reason, when I plot what should be line plots by default, they are getting filled in. I have no indicated for it to do this. My code is below and the resulting image:

Load the CSV files into DataFrames

dfs_event1 = [pd.read_csv(filename, index_col=0) for filename in filenames_event1]
dfs_event2 = [pd.read_csv(filename, index_col=0) for filename in filenames_event2]

def average_across_participants(dfs):
# Assuming all DataFrames have the same structure and index
return pd.concat(dfs).groupby(level=0).mean()

Calculate the averages

avg_event1 = average_across_participants(dfs_event1)
avg_event2 = average_across_participants(dfs_event2)

def plot_networks(df, event_number):
plt.figure(figsize=(10, 6))

# Plot each network using plt.plot() to ensure standard line plots
for network in df.columns:
    plt.plot(df.index, df[network], label=network, linestyle='-', linewidth=1.5)

plt.title(f'Average Activation Across Participants for Event {event_number}')
plt.xlabel('Time')
plt.ylabel('Average Activation')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

Plot for Event 1

plot_networks(avg_event1, 1)

Plot for Event 2

plot_networks(avg_event2, 2)

image
image1000Ă—600 59.7 KB

Is there a way to get it to stop filling in the lines? Thanks!

Cheers,
Emily

2

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s not filling in lines, but rather it is drawing as one line some interleaved data from two different curves (which gives the appearance of “filling in” but is not a true fill). If you view the plot interactively and zoom in on a fairly short time window (a few tens of milliseconds), it should be possible to tell if that’s the case.

An approach to fixing this would be to examine your dataframe, see why you’re ending up with interleaved series, and either exclude one (probably via .loc[...]) or adjust your plotting function so that it accepts more parameters and makes it possible to subset the dataframe to the point where this stops happening.

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