Fix plot auto-display in Jupyter notebooks after style context change

[Copilot]

Commit 9a88b01 wrapped plot generation in plt.style.context(), breaking auto-display in Jupyter when assigning the return value (fig, ax = result.plot()). The context manager prevents the inline backend from automatically displaying figures.

Changes

• Add show parameter to BaseExperiment.plot(): Defaults to True, calls plt.show() after plot generation to restore auto-display behavior
• Position plt.show() outside style context: Prevents style interference with display rendering
• Add test coverage: 5 tests verify default behavior, explicit control, and both PyMC and scikit-learn models

Usage

# Auto-displays (restored default behavior)
fig, ax = result.plot()

# Suppress for customization
fig, ax = result.plot(show=False)
ax.set_title("Custom")
plt.show()

Backward compatible—existing code unchanged.

Original prompt

---

This section details on the original issue you should resolve

<issue_title>Plots not auto-displaying in Jupyter notebooks after style context change</issue_title>
<issue_description>## Description

After commit 9a88b01 ("Don't change matplotlib style on import of causalpy"), plots no longer auto-display in Jupyter notebooks when using the pattern:

fig, ax = result.plot()

Cause

The plot() method in BaseExperiment now wraps the plotting code in plt.style.context():

def plot(self, *args, **kwargs):
    with plt.style.context(az.style.library["arviz-darkgrid"]):
        return self._bayesian_plot(*args, **kwargs)

When a figure is created and returned inside a context manager, Jupyter's inline backend doesn't automatically display it.

Workarounds

Users must now explicitly display plots:

result.plot(); (without assignment)
fig, ax = result.plot(); plt.show()
fig, ax = result.plot(); fig

Proposed fix

Add a show parameter to plot() that defaults to True:

def plot(self, *args, show=True, **kwargs):
    with plt.style.context(az.style.library["arviz-darkgrid"]):
        if isinstance(self.model, PyMCModel):
            fig, ax = self._bayesian_plot(*args, **kwargs)
        ...
        if show:
            plt.show()
        return fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10,4)) ax

This restores expected behavior while allowing show=False for users who need to modify figures before display.

We will need to check all notebook files and use the same pattern (result.plot();) and re-execute the notebooks.</issue_description>

Comments on the Issue (you are @copilot in this section)

@drbenvincent Example of this causing issues is #603 where there are missing plots in the rendered docs

• Fixes Plots not auto-displaying in Jupyter notebooks after style context change #611

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[codecov]

Codecov Report

✅ All modified and coverable lines are covered by tests.
✅ Project coverage is 93.33%. Comparing base (fbf8a61) to head (e501b75).
⚠️ Report is 44 commits behind head on main.

Additional details and impacted files

@@            Coverage Diff             @@
##             main     #616      +/-   ##
==========================================
+ Coverage   93.27%   93.33%   +0.06%     
==========================================
  Files          37       38       +1     
  Lines        5632     5686      +54     
  Branches      367      368       +1     
==========================================
+ Hits         5253     5307      +54     
  Misses        248      248              
  Partials      131      131              

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[drbenvincent]

TODO: test by rerunning notebooks. If it works we can commit those and ready for merge