Creating a Waterfall Chart in Python
The easiest way to do it
When God takes a shower, waterfalls come to life around the world. When I take a shower, my hair usually clogs the drain.
Anthony T. Hincks
A waterfall chart is a specific kind of bar plot that shows how incremental positive and negative changes of a starting value of a data series gradually lead to a final result. The initial and final values are represented by the first and the last columns of a waterfall chart. They start from the horizontal axis and are connected by a series of floating columns related to the positive and negative changes. Sometimes, these intermediate elements are tied with lines. All these features explain numerous alternative names of this visualization type: a bridge / cascade / Mario / flying bricks chart or graph. The last two names are an allusion to the once-popular Super Mario computer game, with the bricks suspended in the air.
Waterfall charts are popular in many branches of quantitative analysis: financial sphere (cash flow, profits & losses, product value, sales over time), performance analysis (employee and company KPI), demographics (population growth, death and birth rates, divorce rate), natural sciences (ecosystem growth, temperature over time), etc.
