Label specific bubbles in Plotly bubble chart

Question

I am having trouble figuring out how to label specific bubbles in a plot.ly bubble chart. I want certain "outlier" bubbles to have text written inside the bubble instead of via hover text.

Let's say I have this data:

import plotly.plotly as py
import plotly.graph_objs as go

trace0 = go.Scatter(
    x=[1, 2, 3, 4],
    y=[10, 11, 12, 13],
    mode='markers',
    marker=dict(
        size=[40, 60, 80, 100],
    )
)

data = [trace0]
py.iplot(data, filename='bubblechart-size')

I'd like to only add text markers on bubbles that correspond to (1,10) and (4,13). Furthermore, is it possible to control the location of text markers?

Answer 1

You can achieve this with annotations .

This allows you to write any text you want on the chart and reference it to your data. You can also control where the text appears using position anchors or by applying an additional calculation on top of the x and y data. For example:

x_data = [1, 2, 3, 4]
y_data = [10, 11, 12, 13]
z_data = [40, 60, 80, 100]

annotations = [
    dict(
        x=x, 
        y=y,
        text='' if 4 > x > 1 else z, # Some conditional to define outliers
        showarrow=False,
        xanchor='center',  # Position of text relative to x axis (left/right/center)
        yanchor='middle',  # Position of text relative to y axis (top/bottom/middle)
    ) for x, y, z in zip(x_data, y_data, z_data)
]

trace0 = go.Scatter(
    x=x_data,
    y=y_data,
    mode='markers',
    marker=dict(
        size=z_data,
    )
)

data = [trace0]
layout = go.Layout(annotations=annotations)

py.iplot(go.Figure(data=data, layout=layout), filename='bubblechart-size')

Edit

If using cufflinks, then the above can be adapted slightly to:

bubbles_to_annotate = df[(df['avg_pos'] < 2) | (df['avg_pos'] > 3)]  # Some conditional to define outliers
annotations = [
    dict(
        x=row['avg_pos'], 
        y=row['avg_neg'],
        text=row['subreddit'],
        showarrow=False,
        xanchor='center',  # Position of text relative to x axis (left/right/center)
        yanchor='middle',  # Position of text relative to y axis (top/bottom/middle)
    ) for _, row in bubbles_to_annotate.iterrows()
]

df.iplot(kind='bubble', x='avg_pos', y='avg_neg', size='counts', 
       text='subreddit', xTitle='Average Negative Sentiment', 
       yTitle='Average Positive Sentiment', annotations=annotations,
       filename='simple-bubble-chart')

You will still need to define the annotations since you need a conditional argument. Then pass this directly to cufflinks via annotations .