How to do a scatter plot with Matplotlib

1 min readMatplotlibPandasDataFrame
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Scatter plots are extremely useful when you want to compare multiple features.

Especially when you want to check whether there is some kind of correlation between those variables.

Here is a simple example of a scatter plot, using the matplotlib library.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

# We read a sample dataset from the web.
df = pd.read_csv('https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mwaskom/seaborn-data/master/iris.csv')

fig, axes = plt.subplots(1,1, figsize=(8,6))

# We do a boxplot plot on the axes
axes.scatter(df["sepal_width"], df["sepal_length"])

# We set a title
axes.set_title("Sepal Length Scatter")

#Set the axis labels
axes.set_xlabel("Sepal Width")
axes.set_ylabel("Sepal Length")

# Fixing the layout to fit the size
fig.tight_layout()

# Showing the plot
plt.show()
An example of a Histogram using the Matplotlib library

As we can see we are using the axes.scatter() method that will plot a boxplot given two lists or pd.Series of values.

In this example, we are plotting the sepal_width versus the sepal_length column.

Here is the result.

A scatter of the sepal width vs length

Here you are! You now know how to make boxplots.

More on plots

If you want to know more about how to add labels, plot different types of plots, etc... check out the other articles I wrote on the topic, just here :

Matplotlib - The Python You Need
We gathered the only Python essentials that you will probably ever need.
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