setting spacing between grouped bar plots in matplotlib

Question

I'm trying to make a grouped bar plot in matplotlib, following the example in the gallery. I use the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(7,7), dpi=300)
xticks = [0.1, 1.1]
groups = [[1.04, 0.96],
          [1.69, 4.02]]
group_labels = ["G1", "G2"]
num_items = len(group_labels)
ind = arange(num_items)
width = 0.1
s = plt.subplot(1,1,1)
for num, vals in enumerate(groups):
    print "plotting: ", vals
    group_len = len(vals)
    gene_rects = plt.bar(ind, vals, width,
                         align="center")
    ind = ind + width
num_groups = len(group_labels)
# Make label centered with respect to group of bars
# Is there a less complicated way?
offset = (num_groups / 2.) * width
xticks = arange(num_groups) + offset
s.set_xticks(xticks)
print "xticks: ", xticks
plt.xlim([0 - width, max(xticks) + (num_groups * width)])
s.set_xticklabels(group_labels)

My questions are:

1. How can I control the space between the groups of bars? Right now the spacing is huge and it looks silly. Note that I do not want to make the bars wider - I want them to have the same width, but be closer together.

2. How can I get the labels to be centered below the groups of bars? I tried to come up with some arithmetic calculations to position the xlabels in the right place (see code above) but it's still slightly off... it feels a bit like writing a plotting library rather than using one. How can this be fixed? (Is there a wrapper or built in utility for matplotlib where this is default behavior?)

EDIT: Reply to @mlgill: thank you for your answer. Your code is certainly much more elegant but still has the same issue, namely that the width of the bars and the spacing between the groups are not controlled separately. Your graph looks correct but the bars are far too wide -- it looks like an Excel graph -- and I wanted to make the bar thinner.

Width and margin are now linked, so if I try:

margin = 0.60
width = (1.-2.*margin)/num_items

It makes the bar skinnier, but brings the group far apart, so the plot again does not look right.

How can I make a grouped bar plot function that takes two parameters: the width of each bar, and the spacing between the bar groups, and plots it correctly like your code did, ie with the x-axis labels centered below the groups?

I think that since the user has to compute specific low-level layout quantities like margin and width, we are still basically writing a plotting library :)

Answer 1

The trick to both of your questions is understanding that bar graphs in Matplotlib expect each series (G1, G2) to have a total width of "1.0", counting margins on either side. Thus, it's probably easiest to set margins up and then calculate the width of each bar depending on how many of them there are per series. In your case, there are two bars per series.

Assuming you left align each bar, instead of center aligning them as you had done, this setup will result in series which span from 0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 to 2.0, and so forth on the x-axis. Thus, the exact center of each series, which is where you want your labels to appear, will be at 0.5, 1.5, etc.

I've cleaned up your code as there were a lot of extraneous variables. See comments within.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

plt.figure(figsize=(7,7), dpi=300)

groups = [[1.04, 0.96],
          [1.69, 4.02]]
group_labels = ["G1", "G2"]
num_items = len(group_labels)
# This needs to be a numpy range for xdata calculations
# to work.
ind = np.arange(num_items)

# Bar graphs expect a total width of "1.0" per group
# Thus, you should make the sum of the two margins
# plus the sum of the width for each entry equal 1.0.
# One way of doing that is shown below. You can make
# The margins smaller if they're still too big.
margin = 0.05
width = (1.-2.*margin)/num_items

s = plt.subplot(1,1,1)
for num, vals in enumerate(groups):
    print "plotting: ", vals
    # The position of the xdata must be calculated for each of the two data series
    xdata = ind+margin+(num*width)
    # Removing the "align=center" feature will left align graphs, which is what
    # this method of calculating positions assumes
    gene_rects = plt.bar(xdata, vals, width)


# You should no longer need to manually set the plot limit since everything 
# is scaled to one.
# Also the ticks should be much simpler now that each group of bars extends from
# 0.0 to 1.0, 1.0 to 2.0, and so forth and, thus, are centered at 0.5, 1.5, etc.
s.set_xticks(ind+0.5)
s.set_xticklabels(group_labels)

Answer 2

Actually I think this problem is best solved by adjusting figsize and width ; here is my output with figsize=(2,7) and width=0.3 :

By the way, this type of thing becomes a lot simpler if you use pandas wrappers (i've also imported seaborn , not necessary for the solution, but makes the plot a lot prettier and more modern looking in my opinion):

import pandas as pd        
import seaborn 
seaborn.set() 

df = pd.DataFrame(groups, index=group_labels)
df.plot(kind='bar', legend=False, width=0.8, figsize=(2,5))
plt.show()

Answer 3

I read an answer that Paul Ivanov posted on Nabble that might solve this problem with less complexity. Just set the index as below. This will increase the spacing between grouped columns.

ind = np.arange(0,12,2)