Option 1: Create subplots from a dictionary of dataframes with long (tidy) data
- Assumptions:
- There is a dictionary of multiple dataframes of tidy data that are either:
- Created by reading in from files
- Created by separating a single dataframe into multiple dataframes
- The categories,
cat
, may be overlapping, but all dataframes don't necessarily contain all values of cat
hue='cat'
- This example uses a
dict
of dataframes, but a list
of dataframes would be similar.
- If the dataframes are wide, use
pandas.DataFrame.melt
to convert them to long form.
- Because dataframes are being iterated through, there's no guarantee that colors will be mapped the same for each plot
- A custom color map needs to be created from the unique
'cat'
values for all the dataframes
- Since the colors will be the same, place one legend to the side of the plots, instead of a legend in every plot
- Tested in
python 3.10
, pandas 1.4.3
, matplotlib 3.5.1
, seaborn 0.11.2
Imports and Test Data
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np # used for random data
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.patches import Patch # for custom legend - square patches
from matplotlib.lines import Line2D # for custom legend - round markers
import seaborn as sns
import math import ceil # determine correct number of subplot
# synthetic data
df_dict = dict()
for i in range(1, 7):
np.random.seed(i) # for repeatable sample data
data_length = 100
data = {'cat': np.random.choice(['A', 'B', 'C'], size=data_length),
'x': np.random.rand(data_length), 'y': np.random.rand(data_length)}
df_dict[i] = pd.DataFrame(data)
# display(df_dict[1].head())
cat x y
0 B 0.944595 0.606329
1 A 0.586555 0.568851
2 A 0.903402 0.317362
3 B 0.137475 0.988616
4 B 0.139276 0.579745
# display(df_dict[6].tail())
cat x y
95 B 0.881222 0.263168
96 A 0.193668 0.636758
97 A 0.824001 0.638832
98 C 0.323998 0.505060
99 C 0.693124 0.737582
Create color mappings and plot
# create color mapping based on all unique values of cat
unique_cat = {cat for v in df_dict.values() for cat in v.cat.unique()} # get unique cats
colors = sns.color_palette('tab10', n_colors=len(unique_cat)) # get a number of colors
cmap = dict(zip(unique_cat, colors)) # zip values to colors
col_nums = 3 # how many plots per row
row_nums = math.ceil(len(df_dict) / col_nums) # how many rows of plots
# create the figure and axes
fig, axes = plt.subplots(row_nums, col_nums, figsize=(9, 6), sharex=True, sharey=True, tight_layout=True)
# convert to 1D array for easy iteration
axes = axes.flat
# iterate through dictionary and plot
for ax, (k, v) in zip(axes, df_dict.items()):
sns.scatterplot(data=v, x='x', y='y', hue='cat', palette=cmap, ax=ax)
sns.despine(top=True, right=True)
ax.legend_.remove() # remove the individual plot legends
ax.set_title(f'dataset = {k}', fontsize=11)
# create legend from cmap
# patches = [Patch(color=v, label=k) for k, v in cmap.items()] # square patches
patches = [Line2D([0], [0], marker='o', color='w', markerfacecolor=v, label=k, markersize=8) for k, v in cmap.items()] # round markers
# place legend outside of plot; change the right bbox value to move the legend up or down
plt.legend(title='cat', handles=patches, bbox_to_anchor=(1.06, 1.2), loc='center left', borderaxespad=0, frameon=False)
plt.show()
Option 2: Create subplots from a single dataframe with multiple separate datasets
- The dataframes must be in a long form with the same column names.
- This option uses
pd.concat
to combine multiple dataframes into a single dataframe, and .assign
to add a new column.
- This option is easier because it doesn't require manually mapping colors to
'cat'
Combine DataFrames
# using df_dict, with dataframes as values, from the top
# combine all the dataframes in df_dict to a single dataframe with an identifier column
df = pd.concat((v.assign(dataset=k) for k, v in df_dict.items()), ignore_index=True)
# display(df.head())
cat x y dataset
0 B 0.944595 0.606329 1
1 A 0.586555 0.568851 1
2 A 0.903402 0.317362 1
3 B 0.137475 0.988616 1
4 B 0.139276 0.579745 1
# display(df.tail())
cat x y dataset
595 B 0.881222 0.263168 6
596 A 0.193668 0.636758 6
597 A 0.824001 0.638832 6
598 C 0.323998 0.505060 6
599 C 0.693124 0.737582 6
g = sns.relplot(kind='scatter', data=df, x='x', y='y', hue='cat', col='dataset', col_wrap=3, height=3)
- Both options create the same result, however, it's less complicated to combine all the dataframes, and plot a figure-level plot with
sns.relplot
.