When you want to add custom data visualizations to your Streamlit dashboard, using Matplotlib is a powerful and flexible choice. Streamlit provides the st.pyplot function, which lets you display Matplotlib figures directly in your app. This allows you to create any chart that Matplotlib supports — such as line charts, bar charts, or scatter plots — and seamlessly embed them in your Streamlit interface. The process involves creating a Matplotlib figure, drawing your plot, and then passing the figure to st.pyplot for rendering.

To understand how this integration works, start by generating some data using NumPy. Here, x is a sequence of points from 0 to 10, and y is the sine of each x value. Next, a Matplotlib figure and axes are created with plt.subplots(). The line chart is drawn using ax.plot(x, y, label="Sine Wave"), and axis labels and a title are added for clarity.

After customizing the plot, you pass the figure object (fig) to Streamlit's st.pyplot function. This single command renders the Matplotlib chart directly in your Streamlit app, making it easy to combine the flexibility of Matplotlib with Streamlit's interactive features. By following this pattern, you can embed any type of Matplotlib visualization in your dashboards.