Stop seaborn plotting multiple figures on top of one another

Alex picture Alex · Mar 15, 2016 · Viewed 46.6k times · Source

I'm starting to learn a bit of python (been using R) for data analysis. I'm trying to create two plots using seaborn, but it keeps saving the second on top of the first. How do I stop this behavior?

import seaborn as sns
iris = sns.load_dataset('iris')

length_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_length', y='species', data=iris).get_figure()
length_plot.savefig('ex1.pdf')
width_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_width', y='species', data=iris).get_figure()
width_plot.savefig('ex2.pdf')

Answer

Leb picture Leb · Mar 15, 2016

You have to start a new figure in order to do that. There are multiple ways to do that, assuming you have matplotlib. Also get rid of get_figure() and you can use plt.savefig() from there.

Method 1

Use plt.clf()

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

iris = sns.load_dataset('iris')

length_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_length', y='species', data=iris)
plt.savefig('ex1.pdf')
plt.clf()
width_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_width', y='species', data=iris)
plt.savefig('ex2.pdf')

Method 2

Call plt.figure() before each one

plt.figure()
length_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_length', y='species', data=iris)
plt.savefig('ex1.pdf')
plt.figure()
width_plot = sns.barplot(x='sepal_width', y='species', data=iris)
plt.savefig('ex2.pdf')