Plotting

Most plotting should be done with the PyLab commands, all of which are loaded when you import Brian. See:

for help on PyLab.

Brian currently defines just two plotting functions of its own, raster_plot() and hist_plot().

brian.raster_plot(*monitors, **additionalplotoptions)

Raster plot of a SpikeMonitor

Usage

raster_plot(monitor,options...)
Plots the spike times of the monitor on the x-axis, and the neuron number on the y-axis
raster_plot(monitor0,monitor1,...,options...)
Plots the spike times for all the monitors given, with y-axis defined by placing a spike from neuron n of m in monitor i at position i+n/m
raster_plot(options...)
Guesses the monitors to plot automagically

Options

Any of PyLab options for the plot command can be given, as well as:

showplot=False
set to True to run pylab’s show() function
newfigure=False
set to True to create a new figure with pylab’s figure() function
xlabel
label for the x-axis
ylabel
label for the y-axis
title
title for the plot
showgrouplines=False
set to True to show a line between each monitor
grouplinecol
colour for group lines
spacebetweengroups
value between 0 and 1 to insert a space between each group on the y-axis
refresh
Specify how often (in simulation time) you would like the plot to refresh. Note that this will only work if pylab is in interactive mode, to ensure this call the pylab ion() command.
showlast
If you are using the refresh option above, plots are much quicker if you specify a fixed time window to display (e.g. the last 100ms).
redraw
If you are using more than one realtime monitor, only one of them needs to issue a redraw command, therefore set this to False for all but one of them.

Note that with some IDEs, interactive plotting will not work with the default matplotlib backend, try doing something like this at the beginning of your script (before importing brian):

import matplotlib
matplotlib.use('WXAgg')

You may need to experiment, try WXAgg, GTKAgg, QTAgg, TkAgg.

brian.hist_plot(histmon=None, **plotoptions)

Plot a histogram

Usage

hist_plot(histmon,options...)
Plot the given histogram monitor
hist_plot(options...)
Guesses which histogram monitor to use

with argument:

histmon
is a monitor of histogram type

Notes

Plots only the first n-1 of n bars in the histogram, because the nth bar is for the interval (-,infinity).

Options

Any of PyLab options for bar can be given, as well as:

showplot=False
set to True to run pylab’s show() function
newfigure=True
set to False not to create a new figure with pylab’s figure() function
xlabel
label for the x-axis
ylabel
label for the y-axis
title
title for the plot