diff --git a/docs/sources/CHANGELOG.md b/docs/sources/CHANGELOG.md
index 1b1cee0b2..c9681eb9f 100755
--- a/docs/sources/CHANGELOG.md
+++ b/docs/sources/CHANGELOG.md
@@ -25,6 +25,8 @@ The CHANGELOG for the current development version is available at
 
 ##### Bug Fixes
 
+- Fix unreadable labels in `plot_confusion_matrix` for imbalanced datasets if `show_absolute=True` and `show_normed=True`. ([#504](https://github.com/rasbt/mlxtend/pull/504))
+
 - Raises a more informative error if a `SparseDataFrame` is passed to `apriori` and the dataframe has integer column names that don't start with `0` due to current limitations of the `SparseDataFrame` implementation in pandas. ([#503](https://github.com/rasbt/mlxtend/pull/503))
 
 ### Version 0.15.0 (01-19-2019)
diff --git a/mlxtend/plotting/plot_confusion_matrix.py b/mlxtend/plotting/plot_confusion_matrix.py
index 762b8dc73..ec70f8e8a 100644
--- a/mlxtend/plotting/plot_confusion_matrix.py
+++ b/mlxtend/plotting/plot_confusion_matrix.py
@@ -66,10 +66,10 @@ def plot_confusion_matrix(conf_mat,
     if figsize is None:
         figsize = (len(conf_mat)*1.25, len(conf_mat)*1.25)
 
-    if show_absolute:
-        matshow = ax.matshow(conf_mat, cmap=cmap)
-    else:
+    if show_normed:
         matshow = ax.matshow(normed_conf_mat, cmap=cmap)
+    else:
+        matshow = ax.matshow(conf_mat, cmap=cmap)
 
     if colorbar:
         fig.colorbar(matshow)