Overlaying actual data on a boxplot from a pandas dataframe

Question

I am using Seaborn to make boxplots from pandas dataframes. Seaborn boxplots seem to essentially read the dataframes the same way as the pandas boxplot functionality (so I hope the solution is the same for both -- but I can just use the dataframe.boxplot function as well). My dataframe has 12 columns and the following code generates a single plot with one boxplot for each column (just like the dataframe.boxplot() function would).

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
sns.set_style("darkgrid", {"axes.facecolor":"darkgrey"})
pal = sns.color_palette("husl",12)
sns.boxplot(dataframe, color = pal)

Can anyone suggest a simple way of overlaying all the values (by columns) while making a boxplot from dataframes? I will appreciate any help with this.

Answer 1

A general solution for the boxplot for the entire dataframe, which should work for both seaborn and pandas as their are all matplotlib based under the hood, I will use pandas plot as the example, assuming import matplotlib.pyplot as plt already in place. As you have already have the ax, it would make better sense to just use ax.text(...) instead of plt.text(...).

In [35]:    
print df
         V1        V2        V3        V4        V5
0  0.895739  0.850580  0.307908  0.917853  0.047017
1  0.931968  0.284934  0.335696  0.153758  0.898149
2  0.405657  0.472525  0.958116  0.859716  0.067340
3  0.843003  0.224331  0.301219  0.000170  0.229840
4  0.634489  0.905062  0.857495  0.246697  0.983037
5  0.573692  0.951600  0.023633  0.292816  0.243963

[6 rows x 5 columns]

In [34]:    
df.boxplot()
for x, y, s in zip(np.repeat(np.arange(df.shape[1])+1, df.shape[0]), 
                   df.values.ravel(), df.values.astype('|S5').ravel()):
    plt.text(x,y,s,ha='center',va='center')

For a single series in the dataframe, a few small changes is necessary:

In [35]:    
sub_df=df.V1
pd.DataFrame(sub_df).boxplot()
for x, y, s in zip(np.repeat(1, df.shape[0]), 
                   sub_df.ravel(), sub_df.values.astype('|S5').ravel()):
    plt.text(x,y,s,ha='center',va='center')

Making scatter plots is also similar:

#for the whole thing
df.boxplot()
plt.scatter(np.repeat(np.arange(df.shape[1])+1, df.shape[0]), df.values.ravel(), marker='+', alpha=0.5)
#for just one column
sub_df=df.V1
pd.DataFrame(sub_df).boxplot()
plt.scatter(np.repeat(1, df.shape[0]), sub_df.ravel(), marker='+', alpha=0.5)

To overlay stuff on boxplot, we need to first guess where each boxes are plotted at among xaxis. They appears to be at 1,2,3,4,..... Therefore, for the values in the first column, we want them to be plot at x=1; the 2nd column at x=2 and so on.

Any efficient way of doing it is to use np.repeat, repeat 1,2,3,4..., each for n times, where n is the number of observations. Then we can make a plot, using those numbers as x coordinates. Since it is one-dimensional, for the y coordinates, we will need a flatten view of the data, provided by df.ravel()

For overlaying the text strings, we need a anther step (a loop). As we can only plot one x value, one y value and one text string at a time.

Answer 2

This hasn't been added to the seaborn.boxplot function yet, but there's something similar in the seaborn.violinplot function, which has other advantages:

x = np.random.randn(30, 6)
sns.violinplot(x, inner="points")
sns.despine(trim=True)

Answer 3

I have the following trick:

data = np.random.randn(6,5)

df = pd.DataFrame(data,columns = list('ABCDE'))

Now assign a dummy column to df:
df['Group'] = 'A'

print df

          A         B         C         D         E Group
0  0.590600  0.226287  1.552091 -1.722084  0.459262     A
1  0.369391 -0.037151  0.136172 -0.772484  1.143328     A
2  1.147314 -0.883715 -0.444182 -1.294227  1.503786     A
3 -0.721351  0.358747  0.323395  0.165267 -1.412939     A
4 -1.757362 -0.271141  0.881554  1.229962  2.526487     A
5 -0.006882  1.503691  0.587047  0.142334  0.516781     A

Use the df.groupby.boxplot(), you get it done.

df.groupby('Group').boxplot()