How to adjust subplot size in seaborn?

Question

%matplotlib inline
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=4)
m = 0
l = 0
for i in k: 
    if l == 4 and m==0:
        m+=1
        l = 0
    data1[i].plot(kind = 'box', ax=axes[m,l], figsize = (12,5))
    l+=1

This outputs subplots as desired.

But when trying to achieve it through seaborn, subplots are stacked close to each other, how do I change size of each subplot?

fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=4)
m = 0
l = 0
plt.figure(figsize=(12,5))
for i in k: 
    if l == 4 and m==0:
        m+=1
        l = 0
    sns.boxplot(x= data1[i],  orient='v' , ax=axes[m,l])
    l+=1

Answer 1

Your call to plt.figure(figsize=(12,5)) is creating a new empty figure different from your already declared fig from the first step. Set the figsize in your call to plt.subplots . It defaults to (6,4) in your plot since you did not set it. You already created your figure and assigned to variable fig . If you wanted to act on that figure you should have done fig.set_size_inches(12, 5) instead to change the size.

You can then simply call fig.tight_layout() to get the plot fitted nicely.

Also, there is a much easier way to iterate through axes by using flatten on your array of axes objects. I am also using data directly from seaborn itself.

# I first grab some data from seaborn and make an extra column so that there
# are exactly 8 columns for our 8 axes
data = sns.load_dataset('car_crashes')
data = data.drop('abbrev', axis=1)
data['total2'] = data['total'] * 2

# Set figsize here
fig, axes = plt.subplots(nrows=2, ncols=4, figsize=(12,5))

# if you didn't set the figsize above you can do the following
# fig.set_size_inches(12, 5)

# flatten axes for easy iterating
for i, ax in enumerate(axes.flatten()):
    sns.boxplot(x= data.iloc[:, i],  orient='v' , ax=ax)

fig.tight_layout()

Without the tight_layout the plots are slightly smashed together. See below.