How to plot a circle with Matplotlib in Python

1 min

A circle plot is called a Pie plot. It depicts the distribution of a given variable.

Here is an example of a pie plot using the soccer world cup winners from 1930 to 2018 retrieved from Wikipedia

Number of world cups won by countries

Here is how to do it in Python

You will first need Matplotlib and Pandas libraries for this example, you can install them by writing this in the console.

pip install matplotlib pandas
Python 2.7
pip3 install matplotlib pandas
Python 3.x

Then run this python script

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

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

# We create our dataframe based on the data we got from Wikipedia
df = pd.DataFrame({"countries": 
                   ['Uruguay','Italy','Italy','Uruguay',
                     'West Germany','Brazil','Brazil',
                     'England','Brazil','West Germany',
                     'Argentina','Italy','Argentina',
                     'West Germany','Brazil','France',
                     'Brazil','Italy','Spain','Germany',
                     'France']})

# We do a pie plot on the axes
axes.pie(x=df["countries"].value_counts(),
         labels=df["countries"].value_counts().index)

# Add a title
axes.set_title("World cup won by countries")

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

# we save the plot
plt.savefig("my_fig.png")

Here you are! You now know how to plot a circle in Python!

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.