Question

for a while I’ve been trying to come up with a good way to graphically represent a data series along with its estimated error.

Recently I saw some graphs where the data was plotted as a line, with a background ‘ribbon’ filling the area between the lines plotting data +/- sigma.

Is there a name for this type of graph, and is there any python toolkit which has the capability to make such plots?

A simple way to fake it with matplotlib would also be useful – right now I’m just plotting three lines, but I don’t know how to fill the area between them.

Answer 1

I would use the fill_between method. Look at the Our Favorite Recipes section of the manual for matplotlib for some good examples. They have one that looks like this:

and another that looks like this: