Dataquest: How to Generate FiveThirtyEight Graphs in Python

If you read data science articles, you may have already stumbled upon FiveThirtyEight’s content. Naturally, you were impressed by their awesome visualizations. You wanted to make your own awesome visualizations and so asked Quora and Reddit how to do it. You received some answers, but they were rather vague. You still can’t get the graphs done yourself.

In this post, we’ll help you. Using Python’s matplotlib and pandas, we’ll see that it’s rather easy to replicate the core parts of any FiveThirtyEight (FTE) visualization.

We’ll start here:

And, at the end of the tutorial, arrive here:

To follow along, you’ll need at least some basic knowledge of Python. If you know what’s the difference between methods and attributes, then you’re good to go.

Introducing the dataset

We’ll work with data describing the percentages of Bachelors conferred to women in the US from 1970 to 2011. We’ll use a dataset compiled by data scientist Randal Olson, who collected the data from the National Center for Education...