Cannot plot all data in a stacked bar chart?

Question

I try to plot a horizontal stacked bar chart, with elevation as the y axis, and Europe and North America (data) stacked along the x-axis with the following code. Not sure what's wrong. Not all data are shown and the width of the bar is too thin to look at.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.barh(EleRegion['Elevation'], EleRegion['Europe'], label = 'Europe')
ax.barh(EleRegion['Elevation'], EleRegion['North America'], label ='North America' )

The dataset is below:

0        0
1      100
2      200
3      300
4      400
5      500
6      600
7      700
8      800
9      900
10    1000
11    1100
12    1200
13    1300
14    1400
15    1500
16    1600
17    1700
18    1800
19    1900
20    2000
21    2100
22    2200
23    2300
Name: Elevation, dtype: int64 0     11188
1      9407
2      8801
3      8801
4      8692
5      7563
6      7134
7      6121
8      5077
9      3684
10     3330
11     1084
12     1084
13      918
14      918
15      776
16      776
17       75
18       75d
19        0
20        0
21        0
22        0
23        0
Name: Europe, dtype: int64
0     2657
1     1786
2     1786
3     1786
4      959
5      885
6      564
7      187
8      187
9        0
10       0
11       0
12       0
13       0
14       0
15       0
16       0
17       0
18       0
19       0
20       0
21       0
22       0
23       0
Name: North America, dtype: int64

///repeat to post/// I try to plot a horizontal stacked bar chart, with elevation as the y axis, and Europe and North America (data) stacked along the x-axis with the following code. Not sure what's wrong. Not all data are shown and the width of the bar is too thin to look at.

Answer 1

You can set Elevation as index and use DataFrame.plot.barh:

ax = EleRegion.set_index('Elevation').plot.barh(stacked=True)
ax.set_ylabel('Count')

Result:

Reason it was not working:

There were two problems:

• Axes.barh accepts y, width and height. You were passing the first two, but the height was still the default 0.8. The issue is that your y axis is in the range of thousands, so the bars were too tiny to be seen. You can set it to 50 and you will see them:

ax.barh(EleRegion['Elevation'],  EleRegion['Europe'], 50, label = 'Europe')

To avoid playing with height, what you do is use integers (e.g., range(len(EleRegion)) as y and set the yticks to the correct numbers. This way, the default height would have worked.

• Another issue is that the second bar chart created by using Axes.barh requires the left parameter to really be "stacked", otherwise the second chart is just rendered on top of the first:

f, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.barh(EleRegion['Elevation'], EleRegion['Europe'], 50, label='Europe')
ax.barh(EleRegion['Elevation'], EleRegion['North America'], 50, left=EleRegion['Europe'], label='North America' )
plt.show()

That's why, since your data is already a DataFrame, it's more convenient to use DataFrame.plot.barh to handle all this automatically.