In APA style, graphical depictions of data—such as pie charts, bar graphs, or scatterplots—are referred to as figures. They are used to efficiently present large sets of results. Three general guidelines apply when preparing them: first, a figure must add important new information rather than repeating data already found in the text or a table; second, it should be as simple as possible, avoiding color unless absolutely necessary; and third, it must be completely interpretable on its own, meaning the reader should be able to understand the basic result solely from the figure and its caption without referencing the main text.

APA Style Figures

To create a bar graph, use plt.bar().
plt.bar() requires 2 arguments, 'x' and 'height'. 'x' refers to the x-coordinates of the bars and 'height' refers to the heights of the bars. 

The following is a simple example of a bar graph.

matplotlib also allows you to create horizontal bar charts, stacked bar charts, grouped bar charts and so on.

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The following are the most common types of graphs used to represent data. 
- Bar Graphs
- Line Graphs
- Pie Charts
- Histograms

Commonly used graphs

Matplotlib Documentations

Bar Graphs

To create a line graph, use ``` plt.plot() ```
plt.plot() does not require any arguments, and thus will show a blank graph if used without arguments. 
Commonly, they are given the inputs horizontal / vertical coordinates of the data points and perhaps a third argument to specify the format.
```
x = [1, 2, 3]
y = np.array([[1, 2], [3, 4], [5, 6]])
plt.plot(x, y)
```
results in the graph

Line Graphs

To create a pie chart, use ```plt.pie()```
plt.pie() requires 1 argument, 'x', which is the wedge sizes, and comes in the form of arrays. The wedges are plotted counterclockwise, starting from the x-axis. 

```
plt.pie([20, 90, 80, 11])
```
results in the graph

Pie Charts

To create a histogram, use ```plt.hist()```
plt.hist() requires one argument, 'x', which represents the input values and is usually an array or a sequence of arrays. With a second input parameter, we can control the bins by giving it an integer or an array. 
```plt.hist(np.random.randn(1000), 5)``` produces the graph in the image. 

It is also possible to animate a histogram after including 
``` import matplotlib.animation as animation``` and creating a function to animate the bars.

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