Unbelievable Stories about UFOs explored using Plotly’s Dash
Tags: Data Science, Dash, Plotly, Big Data, Blog Post

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Have you ever wondered about Unidentified Foreign Objects (UFO’s), extraterrestrial (ET) visitors, what they look like and where they have been sighted around the world ? Can we believe the claims of people observing small spherical objects flying in space? Do they like the United States more than the rest of the world? It was indeed exciting for us to read about what people’s description of their close encounters were around the world, are you too?

Data visualization is the key to convey powerful stories from millions and trillions of data generated in this “ big data “ era. Let’s delve into finding our answers about our ET visitors using a very powerful visualization tool : Plotly’s Dash .

Dash is a productive python framework for building web applications built on Flask, Plotly.js and React.js. It is ideal for deploying plots, visuals, presentations and interactive user interfaces on the web. We were blown away by its architecture, most importantly its simplicity and flexibility to create beautiful web applications for someone with very limited knowledge of CSS, HTML, or D3.js. Using simple python functions, dash core components(dcc), and reactive callbacks, we can create powerful data visualizations on the web.

Dash abstracts the complex code required to create interactive web applications. Dash Core Components and callbacks are powerful tools for big data applications. A good fundamental understanding of callbacks in Dash, can help us create appealing big data visualizations, complex interactive plots and rendering of data on the web. We can also create user interfaces, and interactions for lazy evaluation to pull only the data requested, rather than loading an entire database.

Let’s use Dash to build a simple user interface, we hope to illustrate Dash architecture and find answers about UFOs and ET visitors. There are several step by step tutorials and open source material that could get you started on Dash, in this post we take a shot at explaining the Dash-Python coding framework using examples. We will explore user interfaces, reactive callbacks, integrate interactive plots and figures into a final web dashboard. By the end of this blog post we hope to break the ice, and illustrate the simplicity of creating multiple-input, multiple-output interactive plots with callbacks, using Dash core components. Build an interactive dashboard that combines any number of independent Python functions, to convey any story you want to tell: like us finding answers to UFO sightings.

So let us get our hands dirty and start learning the fundamental structure of Dash to design any interactive visualization.

Spotted 👽 UFO’s in your location 🌏 ,Don’t believe us ❓

Adapted from : https://giphy.com/

Have you ever wondered when, and where UFOs have been sighted? Let us investigate UFO sightings around the world using Plotly and create the framework for an interactive Dash app.