Attempts on issue #43

[yumengch]

This is my attempt to tackle issue #43.

I feel that creating a pull request is an easier way to show the difference between codes as it is not trivial. If you have a better practice for doing this, let me know.

I hope I understand your needs correctly, here are some changes:

• I use the name of the liveplotter as the num arguments of the fig = plt.figure(num) instead of integers (See matplotlib doc here ). This treatment leads to automatic assignment of fig.number and the str type name can be accessed via fig.get_label() (An example use in dapper is here ).
• Hence, I removed all assignment of fignum in LP definitions in dapper (and I hope I find all).
• The consequence is that, in the assimilate calls, we cannot specify selected liveplots via fignum but have to specify via the name of the figures, e.g. sliding_diagnostics. I didn't change much in the function parse_figlist as I think the option with a list of liveplotter names was already implemented.
• Hence, these changes keep the following feature:

  • Being able to reference a subset of the available LPs (HMM.liveplotters) when running experiments, to only plot the selected ones.
  • Clearing the figures rather than creating new ones. This keeps figure position and size on screen, which I find to be very helpful. Note that in the most recent installs of DAPPER the freshfig function works quite well with pre-saved figure positions (on linux at least). This does not require specific figure numbers, but the positions are associated with a given fig number, so fig. number persistence is required.

• Note the fig number persistence is achieved via the name of the liveplotting functions/classes.
• The fuzzy match is not supported and I'm also a bit in doubt about the necessity here.
• I added some documentation for HMM and liveplotting.py in the hope that the use of liveplotters can be clearer in the doc.
• This pull request has passed the tests/test_plotting.py.

Hope this pull request is helpful.

[patnr]

Sorry, about the close/reopen. I was just testing copy-pasting git diffs, and clicked the wrong button. But at least I learnt that this syntax works well, so you can also open Issues for discussions.

```diff
output from git diff
```

However, I would think that a PR is almost always better.

[patnr]

Wonderful! This is exactly what was needed! Even freshfig works almost perfectly still!