[FIXED] Square bubble map

Issue

I'm hoping to make a bubble map, but instead of circles to have squares whose areas are scaled to their value. So something like this:

Is that possible with Matplotlib? Or can bubble maps only consist of circles?

Solution

This code recreates some of the features you have on your example chart, using matplotlib's plot() function, taking advantage of the marker options:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import random

xs = np.arange(1, 5, 1)
ys = np.arange(0.5, 6, 1)

colors = ["gray", "red", "green"]

def square_size_color(value):

    square_color = random.choice(colors)

    if value < 1:
        square_size = random.choice(range(1, 10))
    if 3 > value > 1:
        square_size = random.choice(range(10, 25))
    else:
        square_size = random.choice(range(25, 35))

    return square_size, square_color


for x in xs:
    for y in ys:
        square_size, square_color = square_size_color(y)
        plt.plot(x, y, linestyle="None", marker="s",  # 's' for square marker
                 markersize=square_size, mfc=square_color, mec=square_color)

plt.grid(visible=True, axis='y')
plt.xlim(0.5, 4.5)
plt.ylim(-0.5, 6.5)
plt.show()

This will produce something like:

Although there may be a more direct way of doing this, I believe this will work for what you want to do. Obviously, you can customize the conditions for sizes and colors, and I used the random.choice() just so the chart looks prettier.

Answered By - Gabriel Jablonski