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To get a better sense of the data in the iris.data matrix, let’s visualize it!

With Matplotlib, we can create a 2D scatter plot of the Iris dataset using two of its features (sepal length vs. petal length). The sepal length measurements are stored in column 0 of the matrix, and the petal length measurements are stored in column 2 of the matrix.

But how do we get these values?

Suppose we only want to retrieve the values that are in column 0 of a matrix, we can use the NumPy/pandas notation [:,0] like so:

matrix[:,0]

[:,0] can be translated to [all_rows , column_0]

Once you have the measurements we need, we can make a scatter plot like this:

plt.scatter(x, y)

To show the plot:

plt.show()

Let’s try this! But this time, plot the sepal length (column 0) vs. sepal width (column 1) instead.

Instructions

1.

Store iris.data in a variable named samples.

2.

Create a list named x that contains the column 0 values of samples.

Create a list named y that contains the column 1 values of samples.

3.

Use the .scatter() function to create a scatter plot of x and y.

Because some of the data samples have the exact same features, let’s add alpha=0.5:

plt.scatter(x, y, alpha=0.5)
4.

Call the .show() function to display the graph.

If you didn’t know there are three species of the Iris plant, would you have known just by looking at the visualization?

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