How to increase size of a subplot in seaborn

Question

I'm using seaborn to draw some boxplot. Here is my code

fig, axs = plt.subplots(nrows = 8, ncols=2, figsize = (70,50))
plt.subplots_adjust(hspace = 0.8)

i = 0
j = 0

for item in items:
    ...
    # create dist as a list
    sns.boxplot(data = dist, ax = axs[i][j])

    j += 1

    if j == 2:
        i += 1
        j = 0

I'm changing the length and width in figsize() but it does not change the width of my subplots? what's wrong here?

Answer 1

You also set the aspect ratio by changing the figsize , so it may be better to use something like figsize = (20, 80) in your example rather than the current (70, 50) .

Otherwise, you may need to separately set the aspect ratio. (for example by adding axs[i][j].set_aspect(1) inside your for loop)

Answer 2

Your call to plt.figure(figsize=(60,50)) 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()