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seabornlegendscatter-plot

Edit labels and move legend in seaborn

I have a seaborn scatterplot, which I want to change its labels and move the legend outside the graph. There are many solutions to fix each of the issues, but I cannot fix both of them simultaneously. Adapted from a solution in stackoverflow which was intended for sns.lmplot:

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

g = sns.scatterplot(x="total_bill", y="tip", hue="smoker", data=tips, legend=False)

plt.legend(title='Smoker', bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), labels=['Hell Yeh', 'Nah Bruh'])
plt.show(g)

Here legend=False and is defined later by matplotlib. The issue is the plot only displays the first label and not the rest in the legend.

I have tried another way to modify the label by legend='full' and later modifying it:

g = sns.scatterplot(x="total_bill", y="tip", hue="smoker", data=tips, legend='full')

h,l = g.get_legend_handles_labels()
l = ['Smoking behaviors:','Hell Yeh', 'Nah Bruh']
g.legend(h, l)

but the command g.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), loc=2, borderaxespad=0.)does not work properly and edited labels do not show up. Only original labels are shown.

So, I can fix both of these issues separately, but not at the same time.

Solution

  • In the current version of Seaborn's scatterplot (0.11.1), you can first create the legend in full and afterwards change it by calling ax.legend() again.

    Note that the return value of sns.scatterplot is an ax as it is an axes-level function. This should not be confused with figure level functions which return a complete grid of "axes" and often are written as g = sns....

    Different seaborn functions create legends in different ways. Depending on the options used, the legend can become quite intricate and not easy to change. Making legends easier to modify is planned in Seaborn's future developments.

    from matplotlib import pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

tips = sns.load_dataset('tips')
ax = sns.scatterplot(x="total_bill", y="tip", hue="smoker", data=tips, legend='full')
ax.legend(title='Smoker', bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), labels=['Hell Yeh', 'Nah Bruh'])
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

    resulting plot