How to get output of pandas .plot(kind='kde')

Question

When I plot density distribution of my pandas Series I use

.plot(kind='kde')

Is it possible to get output values of this plot? If yes how to do this? I need the plotted values.

Answer 1

• .plot(kind='kde') returns an Axes object.
• The raw values can be accessed by _x and _y method of the matplotlib.lines.Line2D object in the plot.
  • ax.get_children() can be checked to verify matplotlib.lines.Line2D is at [0].
  • Technically speaking, ._y and ._x are "private" methods, which is discussed in What is the meaning of single and double underscore before an object name?
• Tested in python 3.12.0, pandas 2.1.1, matplotlib 3.8.0

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

In [266]:
np.random.seed(2023)  # for reproducibility 
ser = pd.Series(np.random.randn(1000))  # or df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(1000))
ax = ser.plot(kind='kde')  # or ax = df.plot(kind='kde')

In [265]:
ax.get_children() # Line2D at index 0
Out[265]:
[<matplotlib.lines.Line2D at 0x2b10f8322d0>,
 <matplotlib.spines.Spine at 0x2b10f7ff3e0>,
 <matplotlib.spines.Spine at 0x2b10f69a300>,
 <matplotlib.spines.Spine at 0x2b10db33a40>,
 <matplotlib.spines.Spine at 0x2b10f7ff410>,
 <matplotlib.axis.XAxis at 0x2b10f7ff530>,
 <matplotlib.axis.YAxis at 0x2b10f69a2a0>,
 Text(0.5, 1.0, ''),
 Text(0.0, 1.0, ''),
 Text(1.0, 1.0, ''),
 <matplotlib.patches.Rectangle at 0x2b104c29f40>]
In [264]:
# get the values
x = ax.get_children()[0]._x
y = ax.get_children()[0]._y

plt.plot(x, y)