Setting the order of boxes in sns.boxplot()

[waltonjones]

Love what you are doing with this visualization library.

I am having a hard time, though, figuring out how to set the order for a groupby boxplot. The order of the boxes seems to follow the sorted order of the groupby functionality, alphabetical when I am grouping by genotype. Labels on the boxes, however, seem to follow the order the data take in the dataframe. This leads to mislabeled plots.

Is there a way to specify the order in which the boxes appear?

[mwaskom]

Uh oh, that sounds like a bug. Let me look into it.

[waltonjones]

If you need sample data to replicate, please let me know. I am happy to
provide an IPython notebook and the data file, but I would rather not
put it up on Github just yet. :)

On 21 Nov 2013, at 12:08, Michael Waskom wrote:

Uh oh, that sounds like a bug. Let me look into it.

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#14 (comment)

[mwaskom]

Indeed, it looks like the boxes end up in the alphabetical order of the grouping variable, but the xlabel names end up in the order they appear in the Series. I have replicated it in this gist.

For the time being, you can specify the names as a parameter (demonstrated in the final cell of the example notebook).

Thanks for reporting this! I'll open a PR to fix it tonight.

[waltonjones]

You are fast, my friend. Like lightning.

On 21 Nov 2013, at 12:19, Michael Waskom wrote:

Indeed, it looks like the boxes end up in the alphabetical order of
the grouping variable, but the xlabel names end up in the order they
appear in the Series. I have replicated it in this
gist.

For the time being, you can specify the names as a parameter
(demonstrated in the final cell of the example notebook).

Thanks for reporting this! I'll open a PR to fix it tonight.

---

Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
#14 (comment)

[mwaskom]

Fixed in master!

[waltonjones]

Shall I put in another feature request for the ability to easily specify the order of the boxplot?

[mwaskom]

Sure, go ahead and open a separate issue for that. This fix reminded me that there is a lot of gross repeated code in the setup for boxplot and violin that should be abstracted out. I probably will add the ordering when I get to that, otherwise it will just add more messiness.

In the meantime, you could do (extending the gist example):

cols = ["b", "c", "a"]
data = df.x.groupby(df.g).values[cols]
sns.boxplot(data, names=cols)

as a workaround.