How to do it...

The following code block defines the function and makes a call to the function to plot the Hinton diagram:

1. Read the weight matrix data from an Excel file:

matrix = np.asarray((pd.read_excel('weight_matrix.xlsx')))

2. Instantiate the figure and axes:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

3. Set up the parameters for the axes:

ax.patch.set_facecolor('gray')
ax.set_aspect('equal', 'box')
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(plt.NullLocator())
ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(plt.NullLocator())

4. Plot the Hinton diagram:

max_weight = 2 ** np.ceil(np.log(np.abs(matrix).max()) / np.log(2))
for (x, y), w in np.ndenumerate(matrix):
        color = 'white' if w > 0 else 'black'
        size = np.sqrt(np.abs(w) / max_weight)
        rect = plt.Rectangle([x - size / 2, y - size / 2], size, size, facecolor=color, edgecolor=color)
       ax.add_patch(rect)
ax.autoscale_view()

5. Display it on the screen:

plt.show()