Python matplotlib.pyplot pie charts: How to remove the label on the left side?

Marc picture Marc · Dec 4, 2015 · Viewed 10.9k times · Source

I plot a piechart using pyplot.

import pylab
import pandas as pd
test = pd.Series(['male', 'male', 'male', 'male', 'female'], name="Sex")
test = test.astype("category")
groups = test.groupby([test]).agg(len)
groups.plot(kind='pie', shadow=True)
pylab.show()

The result:

enter image description here

However, I'm unable to remove the label on the left (marked red in the picture). I already tried

plt.axes().set_xlabel('')

and

plt.axes().set_ylabel('')

but that did not work.

Answer

tmdavison picture tmdavison · Dec 4, 2015

You could just set the ylabel by calling pylab.ylabel:

pylab.ylabel('')

or

pylab.axes().set_ylabel('')

In your example, plt.axes().set_ylabel('') will not work because you dont have import matplotlib.pyplot as plt in your code, so plt doesn't exist.

Alternatively, the groups.plot command returns the Axes instance, so you could use that to set the ylabel:

ax=groups.plot(kind='pie', shadow=True)
ax.set_ylabel('')