Quick Start Guide#

Installation#

Data Morph can be installed from PyPI using pip:

$ python -m pip install data-morph-ai

Alternatively, Data Morph can be installed with conda by specifying the conda-forge channel:

$ conda install -c conda-forge data-morph-ai

Usage#

Once installed, Data Morph can be used on the command line or as an importable Python package.

Command line usage#

Run data-morph on the command line:

$ data-morph --start-shape panda --target-shape star

This produces the following animation in the newly-created morphed_data directory within your current working directory:

Morphing the panda dataset into the star shape. — Morphing the panda `Dataset` into the star `Shape`.#

You can smooth the transition with the --ease or --ease-in and --ease-out flags. The --freeze flag allows you to start the animation with the specified number of frames of the initial shape:

$ data-morph --start-shape panda --target-shape star --freeze 50 --ease

Here is the resulting animation:

Morphing the panda dataset into the star shape with easing. — Morphing the panda `Dataset` into the star `Shape` with easing.#

The CLI generates animations for the Cartesian product of the datasets and shapes provided. For example, if you wanted to morph both the music and soccer datasets into both the heart and diamond shapes (i.e., four animations), you could run the command below:

$ data-morph --start-shape music soccer --target-shape heart diamond

Tip

When doing generating multiple animations, it is recommended that you also specify the number of jobs you want to run in parallel (limited by the number of CPU cores on your machine). If you pass 0, Data Morph will run as many as possible:

$ data-morph --start-shape music soccer --target-shape heart diamond --workers 0

If you have the GNU parallel command on your machine, you can use it to run a slightly faster parallelized Data Morph (since it incurs less Python overhead), in which case you don’t need to provide the worker count:

$ parallel --progress -j0 \
>     data-morph --start-shape {1} --target-shape {2} \
>     ::: music soccer ::: heart diamond

Check out the GNU parallel documentation for more options.

See all available CLI options by passing in --help or consulting the CLI Reference:

$ data-morph --help

Python usage#

The DataMorpher class performs the morphing from a Dataset to a Shape. Any DataFrame with numeric columns x and y can be a Dataset. Use the DataLoader to create the Dataset from a file or use a built-in dataset:

from data_morph.data.loader import DataLoader

dataset = DataLoader.load_dataset('panda')

For morphing purposes, all target shapes are placed/sized based on aspects of the Dataset. All shapes are accessible via the ShapeFactory:

from data_morph.shapes.factory import ShapeFactory

shape_factory = ShapeFactory(dataset)
target_shape = shape_factory.generate_shape('star')

With the Dataset and Shape created, here is a minimal example of morphing:

from data_morph.morpher import DataMorpher

morpher = DataMorpher(
    decimals=2,
    in_notebook=False,  # whether you are running in a Jupyter Notebook
    output_dir='data_morph/output',
)

result = morpher.morph(
    start_shape=dataset,
    target_shape=target_shape,
    freeze_for=50,
    ease_in=True,
    ease_out=True,
)

Note

The result variable in the above code block is a DataFrame of the data after completing the specified iterations of the simulated annealing process. The DataMorpher.morph() method is also saving plots to visualize the output periodically and make an animation; these end up in data_morph/output, which we set as DataMorpher.output_dir.

In this example, we morphed the built-in panda Dataset into the star Shape. Be sure to try out the other built-in options:

The DataLoader.AVAILABLE_DATASETS attribute contains a list of available datasets, which are also visualized in the DataLoader documentation.
The ShapeFactory.AVAILABLE_SHAPES attribute contains a list of available shapes, which are also visualized in the ShapeFactory documentation.

For further customization, the Custom Datasets tutorial discusses how to generate custom input datasets, and the Shape Creation tutorial discusses how to generate custom target shapes.