Correcting matplotlib colorbar ticks

Question

I've placed a color bar alongside a choropleth map. Because the data being plotted are discrete rather than continuous values, I've used a LinearSegmentedColormap (using the recipe from the scipy cookbook ), which I've initialised with my max counted value + 1, in order to show a colour for 0. However, I now have two problems:

1. The tick labels are incorrectly spaced (except for 5, more or less) – they should be located in the middle of the colour they identify; ie 0 - 4 should be moved up, and 6 - 10 should be moved down.

2. If I initialise the colorbar with drawedges=True , so that I can style its dividers properties, I get this:

I'm creating my colormap and colorbar like so:

cbmin, cbmax = min(counts), max(counts)
# this normalises the counts to a 0,1 interval
counts /= np.max(np.abs(counts), axis=0)
# density is a discrete number, so we have to use a discrete color ramp/bar
cm = cmap_discretize(plt.get_cmap('YlGnBu'), int(cbmax) + 1)
mappable = plt.cm.ScalarMappable(cmap=cm)
mappable.set_array(counts)
# set min and max values for the colour bar ticks
mappable.set_clim(cbmin, cbmax)
pc = PatchCollection(patches, match_original=True)
# impose our colour map onto the patch collection
pc.set_facecolor(cm(counts))
ax.add_collection(pc,)
cb = plt.colorbar(mappable, drawedges=True)

So I'm wondering whether my converting the counts to a 0,1 interval is one of the problems.

Update :

Having tried what Hooked suggested, the 0-value is correct, but subsequent values are set progressively higher, to the the point where 9 is where 10 should be:

Here's the code I used:

cb = plt.colorbar(mappable)
labels = np.arange(0, int(cbmax) + 1, 1)
loc = labels + .5
cb.set_ticks(loc)
cb.set_ticklabels(labels)

And just to confirm, labels definitely has the correct values:

In [3]: np.arange(0, int(cbmax) + 1, 1)
Out[3]: array([ 0,  1,  2,  3,  4,  5,  6,  7,  8,  9, 10])

Answer 1

You are suffering from an off-by-one error. You have 10 ticklabels spread among 11 colors. You might be able to correct the error by using np.linspace instead of np.arange . Using np.linspace the third argument is the number of values desired. This reduces the amount of mental gymnastics needed to avoid the off-by-one error:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.cm as cm
import matplotlib.colors as mcolors

def colorbar_index(ncolors, cmap):
    cmap = cmap_discretize(cmap, ncolors)
    mappable = cm.ScalarMappable(cmap=cmap)
    mappable.set_array([])
    mappable.set_clim(-0.5, ncolors+0.5)
    colorbar = plt.colorbar(mappable)
    colorbar.set_ticks(np.linspace(0, ncolors, ncolors))
    colorbar.set_ticklabels(range(ncolors))

def cmap_discretize(cmap, N):
    """Return a discrete colormap from the continuous colormap cmap.

        cmap: colormap instance, eg. cm.jet. 
        N: number of colors.

    Example
        x = resize(arange(100), (5,100))
        djet = cmap_discretize(cm.jet, 5)
        imshow(x, cmap=djet)
    """

    if type(cmap) == str:
        cmap = plt.get_cmap(cmap)
    colors_i = np.concatenate((np.linspace(0, 1., N), (0.,0.,0.,0.)))
    colors_rgba = cmap(colors_i)
    indices = np.linspace(0, 1., N+1)
    cdict = {}
    for ki,key in enumerate(('red','green','blue')):
        cdict[key] = [ (indices[i], colors_rgba[i-1,ki], colors_rgba[i,ki])
                       for i in xrange(N+1) ]
    # Return colormap object.
    return mcolors.LinearSegmentedColormap(cmap.name + "_%d"%N, cdict, 1024)

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
A = np.random.random((10,10))*10
cmap = plt.get_cmap('YlGnBu')
ax.imshow(A, interpolation='nearest', cmap=cmap)
colorbar_index(ncolors=11, cmap=cmap)    
plt.show()

Answer 2

You can control the placement and the labels by hand. I'll start with a linear cmap generated from cmap_discretize on the page you linked :

import numpy as np
import pylab as plt

# The number of divisions of the cmap we have
k = 10

# Random test data
A = np.random.random((10,10))*k
c = cmap_discretize('jet', k)

# First show without
plt.subplot(121)
plt.imshow(A,interpolation='nearest',cmap=c)
plt.colorbar()

# Now label properly
plt.subplot(122)
plt.imshow(A,interpolation='nearest',cmap=c)

cb = plt.colorbar()
labels = np.arange(0,k,1)
loc    = labels + .5
cb.set_ticks(loc)
cb.set_ticklabels(labels)

plt.show()