Matplotlib: scatter plot with colormaps for edgecolor but no facecolor

Question

I want to have a scatter plot with colormap for edgecolors but no facecolors. When I use facecolor=\'None\', it does not work.

import numpy as          


        

Answer 1

The problem is that color= overrides the facecolors= argument.

The solution I came up with is to get the PathCollection returned by pyplot.scatter() and then change the facecolor directly. Note that you probably need to increase the line width to see the edges better.

import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt


N = 50
x = np.random.rand(N)
y = np.random.rand(N)
colors = np.random.rand(N)
area = np.pi * (15 * np.random.rand(N))**2  # 0 to 15 point radii

a = plt.scatter(x, y, s=area,c=colors,facecolor='none',lw=2,cmap="gist_rainbow", alpha=0.5)
a.set_facecolor('none')
plt.show()