title: Alternative for matshow()
body: <p>I have a <code>101x101</code> matrix that I want to visualize graphically. So far I used the function <code>matshow</code> from <code>matplotlib.pyplot</code> as below:</p>
  
  <pre><code>import numpy as np
  import random
  import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
  
  A = np.zeros((101,101))
  # do stuff to randomly change some values of A
  plt.ion()
  plt.matshow(A,cmap='PuBuGn')
  plt.colorbar()
  plt.show()
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>The output looks like this:
  <a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBCLa.png" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/IBCLa.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>
  
  <p>You should view this as an interaction matrix between species, and as you can see there are only three species strongly interacting. That is why it looks appropriate to consider a visualization like the following graph I found in a <a href="http://journals.plos.org/ploscompbiol/article?id=10.1371/journal.pcbi.1004688" rel="nofollow">paper</a>, but I do not know if and how this can be implemented in Python:</p>
  
  <p><a href="https://i.stack.imgur.com/X4xBy.png" rel="nofollow"><img src="https://i.stack.imgur.com/X4xBy.png" alt="enter image description here"></a></p>