How does one plot 5.2 million XY data points? <\/p>\n
I ran into this while working on a paper submission. This is one thing one does not lack for when doing evolutionary computation: size of data sets.<\/p>\n
Matlab seems to become dog slow and unstable when trying to plot large numbers of data points. The interface bogs down such that trying to re-label axes is a real chore.<\/p>\n
I tried out the GNU R package, and had it crash on trying to read in the data set.<\/p>\n
Then I started going through plotting packages in the FreeBSD ports system. That’s where I came across the GRI package<\/a>. This is an open source, GPL licensed graph plotting language. It has simple examples available online. As its documentation notes, it is a package with a fairly shallow learning curve. Its interface is entirely command-line, and its output option is PostScript. In interaction, it simply outputs PostScript graphic after Postscript graphic, simply named “gri-nn<\/i>.ps” in the current working directory. One can import data from an ASCII file, where columns are separated by white space. <\/p>\n So that’s exactly what I did. 5.2 million data points in, one 151MB Postscript graphic out. Ghostscript can convert that to PDF, which can then be converted to all sorts of raster-based graphics formats. It’s not a perfect solution, but it is a working<\/i> solution.<\/p>\n Back to the grind for me…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" How does one plot 5.2 million XY data points? I ran into this while working on a paper submission. This<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"colormag_page_container_layout":"default_layout","colormag_page_sidebar_layout":"default_layout","footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-786","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computation"],"magazineBlocksPostFeaturedMedia":{"thumbnail":false,"medium":false,"medium_large":false,"large":false,"1536x1536":false,"2048x2048":false,"colormag-highlighted-post":false,"colormag-featured-post-medium":false,"colormag-featured-post-small":false,"colormag-featured-image":false,"colormag-default-news":false,"colormag-featured-image-large":false},"magazineBlocksPostAuthor":{"name":"Wesley R. Elsberry","avatar":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0397e612e6e0615428fba05fe25422d5920a74e203aa8a035183297dcb4ffe5e?s=96&r=g"},"magazineBlocksPostCommentsNumber":false,"magazineBlocksPostExcerpt":"How does one plot 5.2 million XY data points? I ran into this while working on a paper submission. This","magazineBlocksPostCategories":["Computation"],"magazineBlocksPostViewCount":28,"magazineBlocksPostReadTime":2,"magazine_blocks_featured_image_url":{"full":false,"medium":false,"thumbnail":false},"magazine_blocks_author":{"display_name":"Wesley R. Elsberry","author_link":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/author\/austringer\/"},"magazine_blocks_comment":13,"magazine_blocks_author_image":"https:\/\/secure.gravatar.com\/avatar\/0397e612e6e0615428fba05fe25422d5920a74e203aa8a035183297dcb4ffe5e?s=96&r=g","magazine_blocks_category":"Computation<\/a>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=786"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/786\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=786"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=786"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/austringer.net\/wp\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=786"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}