Syd: A package for making interactive data visualizations in python
Andrew T. Landau · The Journal of Open Source Software · 2025
Gaining an intuitive feel for the patterns in scientific data is fundamental to the scientific process.However, in the era of large datasets, it is not only challenging to understand the patterns in the data, but it is often a significant technical burden to simply plot the data in a satisfactory manner.For example, typical neuroscience datasets can have thousands to millions of neurons, spanning across recordings sessions and experimental subjects.Each neuron might contain a hint of a discovery.Similarly, studying the inner-workings of large-language models often comes down to looking at the activation patterns of thousands of neurons to understand how they represent text.Syd represents a solution that supports interactive data analysis of rich datasets.It provides a python interface that enables the rapid construction of interactive plots, which enable scientists to quickly and easily look through all their data.