CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pandasmatplotlibseaborn
Thomas Matthew
Thomas Matthew

Reputation: 2886

Overlay two seaborn barplots of different size

Say there are two datasets: a big "background" set, and much smaller "foreground" set. The foreground set comes from the background, but might be much smaller.

I am interested in showing the entire background distribution in an ordered sns.barplot, and have the foreground set a brighter contrasting color to draw attention to these samples.

The best solution I could find is to display one graph on top of the other, but what happens is the graph shrinks down to the smaller domain. Here's what I mean:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn

# Load the example car crash dataset
crashes = sns.load_dataset("car_crashes").sort_values("total", ascending=False)

# states of interest
txcahi = crashes[crashes['abbrev'].isin(['TX','CA','HI'])]

# Plot the total crashes
f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.xticks(rotation=90, fontsize=10)
sns.barplot(y="total", x="abbrev", data=crashes, label="Total", color="lightgray")

# overlay special states onto gray plot as red bars
sns.barplot(y="total", x="abbrev", data=txcahi, label="Total", color="red")
sns.despine(left=True, bottom=True)

This data produces: enter image description here

But it should look like this (ignore stylistic differences): enter image description here

Why doesn't this approach work, and what would be a better way to accomplish this?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 3580

Answers (1)

ImportanceOfBeingErnest
ImportanceOfBeingErnest

Reputation: 339220

A seaborn barplot just plots the its n data along the values of 0 to n-1. If instead you'd use a matplotlib bar plot, which is unit aware (from matplotlib 2.2 onwards), it'll work as expected.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# Load the example car crash dataset
crashes = sns.load_dataset("car_crashes").sort_values("total", ascending=False)

# states of interest
txcahi = crashes[crashes['abbrev'].isin(['TX','CA','HI'])]

# Plot the total crashes
f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(10, 5))
plt.xticks(rotation=90, fontsize=10)

plt.bar(height="total", x="abbrev", data=crashes, label="Total", color="lightgray")
plt.bar(height="total", x="abbrev", data=txcahi, label="Total", color="red")

sns.despine(left=True, bottom=True)

enter image description here

Upvotes: 1

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