Add visualization in notebooks / Colab

Hi,

I managed to explore all the basic features of this great tool within the GPU-enabled notebooks provided in Google Colab and Kaggle. I was also able to run and view the tensorboard.

The only thing I missed is the visualization, as I didn’t manage to find a way to plot from the notebook. Is there a way to call the CLI functions from python, and make them return a matplotlib plot? In this way they could be visualized with %matplotlib inline, or %matplotlib notebook in case we need to zoom or interact.

[w4nderlust]

This PR refactors and exposes the visualization functions: https://github.com/uber/ludwig/pull/427 Closing the conversation, but please feel free to post opinions and feedback, as now the refactoring allows for further improvement much more easily.

[floscha]

Hey @w4nderlust, I understand that the visualize module is made for internal usage and is definitely not useless for that matter 😉However, there appears to be a considerable number of people for which the current way of plotting programmatically seems rather obscure. Especially since its usage differs quite a bit from the CLI commands which do not require lists or an explicit field value.

I would be very glad to help with Ludwig’s visualization in notebooks. Since you mentioned that you are planning to add visualization to the programmatic API, are there any ideas yet what that API should look like?