I would like to create a version of this 2D binned "color map" with smoothed colors.
I am not even sure this would be the correct nomenclature for the plot, but, essentially, I want my figure to be color coded by the median values of a third variable for points that reside in each defined bin of my (X, Y) space.
Even though I am able to accomplish that to a certain degree (see example), I would like to find a way to create a version of the same plot with a smoothed color gradient. That would allow me to visualize the overall behavior of my distribution.
I tried ideas described here: Smoothing 2D map in python
and here: Python: binned_statistic_2d mean calculation ignoring NaNs in data
as well as links therein, but could not find a clear solution to the problem.
This is what I have so far:
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib import cm
from scipy.stats import binned_statistic_2d
import random
random.seed(999)
x = np.random.normal (0,10,5000)
y = np.random.normal (0,10,5000)
z = np.random.uniform(0,10,5000)
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(20, 20))
plt.rcParams.update({'font.size': 10})
ax = fig.add_subplot(3,3,1)
ax.set_axisbelow(True)
plt.grid(b=True, lw=0.5, zorder=-1)
x_bins = np.arange(-50., 50.5, 1.)
y_bins = np.arange(-50., 50.5, 1.)
cmap = plt.cm.get_cmap('jet_r',1000) #just a colormap
ret = binned_statistic_2d(x, y, z, statistic=np.median, bins=[x_bins, y_bins]) # Bin (X, Y) and create a map of the medians of "Colors"
plt.imshow(ret.statistic.T, origin='bottom', extent=(-50, 50, -50, 50), cmap=cmap)
plt.xlim(-40,40)
plt.ylim(-40,40)
plt.xlabel("X", fontsize=15)
plt.ylabel("Y", fontsize=15)
ax.set_yticks([-40,-30,-20,-10,0,10,20,30,40])
bounds = np.arange(2.0, 20.0, 1.0)
plt.colorbar(ticks=bounds, label="Color", fraction=0.046, pad=0.04)
# save plots
plt.savefig("Whatever_name.png", bbox_inches='tight')
Which produces the following image (from random data):
Therefore, the simple question would be: how to smooth these colors?
Thanks in advance!
PS: sorry for excessive coding, but I believe a clear visualization is crucial for this particular problem.