How to set fontsize of axis label with LaTex symbol on matplotlib/seaborn?

Question

In matplotlib, how can I change the font size of a latex symbol?

I have the following code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

# get x and y from file

plt.plot(x, y,  linestyle='--', marker='o', color='b')
plt.xlabel(r'$\alpha$ (distance weighted)', fontsize='large')
plt.ylabel('AUC')
plt.show()

But I get the following graph:

Notice that the $\\alpha$ is still small.

Answer 1

To increase the size of the fonts set the desired value to fontsize. One way to mitigate the difference between the "normal" font and the "latex" one is by using \\mathrm. The example below shows the behaviour of doing this:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

x = np.arange(10)
y = np.random.rand(10)

fig = plt.figure(1, figsize=(10,10))

for i, j in zip(np.arange(4), [10,15,20,30]):
    ax = fig.add_subplot(2,2,i+1)
    ax.plot(x, y,  linestyle='--', marker='o', color='b')
    ax.set_xlabel(r'$\mathrm{\alpha \ (distance \ weighted)}$', fontsize=j)
    ax.set_ylabel('AUC')
plt.show()