How to edit properties of whiskers, fliers, caps, etc. in Seaborn boxplot

dsholes picture dsholes · Apr 26, 2016 · Viewed 8.8k times · Source

I have created a nested boxplot with an overlayed stripplot using the Seaborn package. I have seen answers on stackoverflow regarding how to edit box properties both for individual boxes and for all boxes using ax.artists generated by sns.boxplot.

Is there any way to edit whisker, cap, flier, etc. properties using a similar method? Currently I have to manually edit values in the restyle_boxplot method of the _BoxPlotter() class in the seaborn -> categorical.py file to get from the default plot to the desired plot:

Default Plot: Default Plot

Desired Plot: Desired Plot

Here is my code for reference:

sns.set_style('whitegrid')

fig1, ax1 = plt.subplots()


ax1 = sns.boxplot(x="Facility", y="% Savings", hue="Analysis",
             data=totalSavings)

plt.setp(ax1.artists,fill=False) # <--- Current Artist functionality

ax1 = sns.stripplot(x="Facility", y="% Savings", hue="Analysis",
                    data=totalSavings, jitter=.05,edgecolor = 'gray',
                    split=True,linewidth = 0, size = 6,alpha = .6)

ax1.tick_params(axis='both', labelsize=13)
ax1.set_xticklabels(['Test 1','Test 2','Test 3','Test 4','Test 5'], rotation=90)
ax1.set_xlabel('')
ax1.set_ylabel('Percent Savings (%)', fontsize = 14)


handles, labels = ax1.get_legend_handles_labels()
legend1 = plt.legend(handles[0:3], ['A','B','C'],bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), 
                     loc=2, borderaxespad=0.)
plt.setp(plt.gca().get_legend().get_texts(), fontsize='12') 
fig1.set_size_inches(10,7)

Answer

tmdavison picture tmdavison · Apr 27, 2016

You need to edit the Line2D objects, which are stored in ax.lines.

Heres a script to create a boxplot (based on the example here), and then edit the lines and artists to the style in your question (i.e. no fill, all the lines and markers the same colours, etc.)

You can also fix the rectangle patches in the legend, but you need to use ax.get_legend().get_patches() for that.

I've also plotted the original boxplot on a second Axes, as a reference.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

fig,(ax1,ax2) = plt.subplots(2)

sns.set_style("whitegrid")
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

sns.boxplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker", data=tips, palette="Set1", ax=ax1)
sns.boxplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker", data=tips, palette="Set1", ax=ax2)

for i,artist in enumerate(ax2.artists):
    # Set the linecolor on the artist to the facecolor, and set the facecolor to None
    col = artist.get_facecolor()
    artist.set_edgecolor(col)
    artist.set_facecolor('None')

    # Each box has 6 associated Line2D objects (to make the whiskers, fliers, etc.)
    # Loop over them here, and use the same colour as above
    for j in range(i*6,i*6+6):
        line = ax2.lines[j]
        line.set_color(col)
        line.set_mfc(col)
        line.set_mec(col)

# Also fix the legend
for legpatch in ax2.get_legend().get_patches():
    col = legpatch.get_facecolor()
    legpatch.set_edgecolor(col)
    legpatch.set_facecolor('None')

plt.show()

enter image description here