Rotate label text in seaborn

Question

I have a simple factorplot

import seaborn as sns
g = sns.factorplot("name", "miss_ratio", "policy", dodge=.2, 
    linestyles=["none", "none", "none", "none"], data=df[df["level"] == 2])

The problem is that the x labels all run together, making them unreadable. How do you rotate the text so that the labels are readable?

Librarianship

This helped me: #74716267 – Schumacher

For seaborn.objects with v0.12, see How to rotate the xticks with seaborn.objects – Anticipant

Answer 1

You can rotate tick labels with the tick_params method on matplotlib Axes objects. To provide a specific example:

ax.tick_params(axis='x', rotation=90)

Strawser

This works but ax should be g for this example: g.tick_params(axis='x', rotation=90) – Osburn

Answer 2

I had a problem with the answer by @mwaskorn, namely that

g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30)

fails, because this also requires the labels. A bit easier than the answer by @Aman is to just add

plt.xticks(rotation=45)

Wildebeest

You can also get the labels like so g.set_xticklabels(g.get_xticklabels(), rotation=30). Assign it to a variable if you want to suppress the output. – Mon

I think this is correct, when setting plt.xtics worked for me. – Butene

tried all the options above for a violin plot and plt.xticks(rotation=n) is only one I could get to work – Suspensoid

When I try this, my xticklabels are no longer aligned with the x ticks. Does anyone know why? – Lotta

I recommend to also add plt.tight_layout(), so that the margins are adjusted to fit the text – Twobyfour

g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30) works on FacetGrid now – Twobyfour

g.tick_params('x', rotation=90) seems to work as of September 2022. – Lacee

Answer 3

This is still a matplotlib object. Try this:

# <your code here>
locs, labels = plt.xticks()
plt.setp(labels, rotation=45)

Congruent

Answer 4

Any seaborn plots suported by facetgrid won't work with (e.g. catplot)

g.set_xticklabels(rotation=30) 

however barplot, countplot, etc. will work as they are not supported by facetgrid. Below will work for them.

g.set_xticklabels(g.get_xticklabels(), rotation=30)

Also, in case you have 2 graphs overlayed on top of each other, try set_xticklabels on graph which supports it.

Crabwise

Answer 5

If anyone wonders how to this for clustermap CorrGrids (part of a given seaborn example):

import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
sns.set(context="paper", font="monospace")

# Load the datset of correlations between cortical brain networks
df = sns.load_dataset("brain_networks", header=[0, 1, 2], index_col=0)
corrmat = df.corr()

# Set up the matplotlib figure
f, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(12, 9))

# Draw the heatmap using seaborn
g=sns.clustermap(corrmat, vmax=.8, square=True)
rotation = 90 
for i, ax in enumerate(g.fig.axes):   ## getting all axes of the fig object
     ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation = rotation)


g.fig.show()

Spies

Answer 6

You can also use plt.setp as follows:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

plot=sns.barplot(data=df,  x=" ", y=" ")
plt.setp(plot.get_xticklabels(), rotation=90)

to rotate the labels 90 degrees.

Vang

Answer 7

For a seaborn.heatmap, you can rotate these using (based on @Aman's answer)

pandas_frame = pd.DataFrame(data, index=names, columns=names)
heatmap = seaborn.heatmap(pandas_frame)
loc, labels = plt.xticks()
heatmap.set_xticklabels(labels, rotation=45)
heatmap.set_yticklabels(labels[::-1], rotation=45) # reversed order for y

Yelena

Answer 8

If the labels have long names it may be hard to get it right. A solution that worked well for me using catplot was:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
fig = plt.gcf()
fig.autofmt_xdate()

Labe

Answer 9

Use ax.tick_params(labelrotation=45). You can apply this to the axes figure from the plot without having to provide labels. This is an alternative to using the FacetGrid if that's not the path you want to take.

Rimma