Getting Colorbar instance of scatter plot in pandas/matplotlib

Question

How do I get the internally created colorbar instance of a plot created by pandas.DataFrame.plot?

Here is an example for generating a colored scatter plot:

Answer 1

It's not quite the same but you could just plot using matplotlib:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import itertools as it

# [ (0,0), (0,1), ..., (9,9) ]
xy_positions = list( it.product( range(10), range(10) ) )

df = pd.DataFrame( xy_positions, columns=['x','y'] )

# draw 100 floats
df['score'] = np.random.random( 100 )

fig = plt.figure()
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)

s = ax.scatter(df.x, df.y, c=df.score, s=500)
cb = plt.colorbar(s)
cb.set_label('desired_label')

ax.set_xlim( [-0.5,9.5] )
ax.set_ylim( [-0.5,9.5] )

plt.show()