Ranking charts in Matplotlib - Mini Project: Build & Apply

Ranking Charts with Matplotlib

📖 Scenario: You work for a small company that wants to see how their products rank in sales compared to each other. They want a simple chart that shows the ranking of each product by sales numbers.

🎯 Goal: You will create a ranking chart using matplotlib to visualize product sales rankings clearly.

📋 What You'll Learn

Create a dictionary with product names and their sales numbers

Create a variable to hold the number of top products to show

Use sorting and slicing to get the top products by sales

Create a horizontal bar chart showing product names and their sales

Display the chart with clear labels and title

💡 Why This Matters

🌍 Real World

Ranking charts help businesses quickly see which products or items perform best, making it easier to focus on popular items.

💼 Career

Data analysts and business intelligence professionals often create ranking charts to present sales or performance data clearly to stakeholders.

1

Create the sales data dictionary

Create a dictionary called product_sales with these exact entries: 'Laptop': 120, 'Smartphone': 300, 'Tablet': 150, 'Headphones': 90, 'Smartwatch': 80.

Matplotlib

# Create the product_sales dictionary with exact values
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use curly braces {} to create a dictionary with keys as product names and values as sales numbers.

2

Set the number of top products to display

Create a variable called top_n and set it to 3 to show the top 3 products.

Matplotlib

product_sales = {'Laptop': 120, 'Smartphone': 300, 'Tablet': 150, 'Headphones': 90, 'Smartwatch': 80}
# Create the variable top_n and set it to 3
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Just assign the number 3 to the variable top_n.

3

Get the top products by sales

Create a list called top_products that contains the top top_n products sorted by sales in descending order. Use sorted() with product_sales.items() and a lambda function to sort by sales.

Matplotlib

product_sales = {'Laptop': 120, 'Smartphone': 300, 'Tablet': 150, 'Headphones': 90, 'Smartwatch': 80}
top_n = 3
# Create top_products list with top_n products sorted by sales descending
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Use sorted() with key=lambda x: x[1] and reverse=True to sort by sales descending, then slice with [:top_n].

4

Plot the ranking chart and display it

Use matplotlib.pyplot to create a horizontal bar chart of the top products. Extract product names and sales from top_products. Use plt.barh() to plot, set the title to 'Top 3 Product Sales', label the x-axis as 'Sales', and show the plot with plt.show().

Matplotlib

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

product_names = [item[0] for item in top_products]
sales_values = [item[1] for item in top_products]

# Create a horizontal bar chart with plt.barh()
# Set title to 'Top 3 Product Sales'
# Label x-axis as 'Sales'
# Show the plot
# Your code here

Need a hint?

Remember to reverse the lists to show the highest sales at the top in the horizontal bar chart.