Line Plots

The line plot is a fairly common plot type that is used to plot the trend of one numeric variable against values of a second variable. In contrast to a scatterplot, where all data points are plotted, in a line plot, only one point is plotted for every unique x-value or bin of x-values (like a histogram). If there are multiple observations in an x-bin, then the y-value of the point plotted in the line plot will be a summary statistic (like mean or median) of the data in the bin. The plotted points are connected with a line that emphasizes the sequential or connected nature of the x-values.

If the x-variable represents time, then a line plot of the data is frequently known as a time series plot. For example, we have only one observation per time period, like in stock or currency charts.

We will make use of Matplotlib's errorbar() function, performing some processing on the data in order to get it into its necessary form.