Plotting 3D data

Many of the data analysis packages (R, Python, and so on) have significant data visualization capabilities. An interesting one is to display data in three dimensions. Often, when three dimensions are used, unexpected visualizations appear.

For this example, we are using the car dataset from https://uci.edu/. It is a well-used dataset with several attributes for vehicles, for example, mpg, weight, and acceleration. What if we were to plot three of those data attributes together and see if we can recognize any apparent rules?

The coding involved is as follows:

%matplotlib inline
# import tools we are using
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from mpl_toolkits.mplot3d import Axes3D
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
# read in the car 'table' – not a csv, so we need
# to add in the column names
column_names = ['mpg', 'cylinders', 'displacement', 'horsepower', 'weight', 'acceleration', 'year', 'origin', 'name']
df = pd.read_table('http://archive.ics.uci.edu/ml/machine-learning-databases...