Visualizing time series

Most of the time, having a high-level overview of your data is an excellent way to get to know your data. The best way to get an overview of a time series is by visualizing it.

There are multiple ways to visualize a time series, including tools such as R or Matlab, or using a large amount of existing JavaScript packages. In this section, we are going to use a Python package called Matplotlib for visualizing the data. Additionally, we will save the output to a PNG file. A viable alternative to this is to use a Jupyter notebook – Jupyter comes with Anaconda – and display the graphical output on your favorite web browser.

The visualize.py script reads a plain text file with values – a time series – and creates a plot. The Python code of visualize.py is as follows:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import sys
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import math
def main():
    if len(sys...