Plotting categorical data with pandas and matplotlib

Question

I have a data frame with categorical data:

     colour  direction
1    red     up
2    blue    up
3    green   down
4    red     left
5    red     right
6            


        

Answer 1

You could also use countplot from seaborn. This package builds on pandas to create a high level plotting interface. It gives you good styling and correct axis labels for free.

import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns
sns.set()

df = pd.DataFrame({'colour': ['red', 'blue', 'green', 'red', 'red', 'yellow', 'blue'],
                   'direction': ['up', 'up', 'down', 'left', 'right', 'down', 'down']})
sns.countplot(df['colour'], color='gray')

It also supports coloring the bars in the right color with a little trick

sns.countplot(df['colour'],
              palette={color: color for color in df['colour'].unique()})