Realtime Plotting made simple using gnuplot

So, I was stuck in tuning the hyperparameters for a DQN agent when a problem struck me! I needed graphs to reliably compare as well as view the whole performance of the agent in all the episodes. gnuplots was the way forward. Lightweight, simple and fast.

gnuplots

The syntax is as follows:

plot 'plotRewards.dat' using 1:2 with lines
pause 0.5 
reread
set autoscale 

The plotRewards.datis the file storing the data that was written it the relevent program in the format of every datax y on a new line.

The pauselets you specify the break in seconds (Self-explanatory).

Coming to reread is the most important part for realtime plotting as this tells gnuplots to re-read the above specified file again.

As the new values keep coming, they go out of range. Setting the autoscale using set autoscale enables autoscaling in both the axis.

This is really helpful for quick insight into the loads of data which is getting published in the terminal faster than can be sanely understood.

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