Stop seaborn plotting multiple figures on top of one another

Question

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

Answer 1

Create specific figures and plot onto them:

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

length_fig, length_ax = plt.subplots()
sns.barplot(x='sepal_length', y='species', data=iris, ax=length_ax)
length_fig.savefig('ex1.pdf')

width_fig, width_ax = plt.subplots()
sns.barplot(x='sepal_width', y='species', data=iris, ax=width_ax)
width_fig.savefig('ex2.pdf')

Answer 2

I agree with a previous comment that importing matplotlib.pyplot is not the best software engineering practice as it exposes the underlying library. As I was creating and saving plots in a loop, then I needed to clear the figure and found out that this can now be easily done by importing seaborn only:

import seaborn as sns

data = np.random.normal(size=100)
path = "/path/to/img/plot.png"

plot = sns.distplot(data)
plot.get_figure().savefig(path)
plot.get_figure().clf() # this clears the figure

# ... continue with next figure

Answer 3

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')