Hiding the y-axis in this plot

Question

Simple question: I need to hide the y-axis from the plot generated by this code:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn
seaborn.set(style="white")
import random

objects = [("Zachary's karate club", 78),
            ("dolphins social network", 159),
            ("C. elegans connectome", 2148 ),
            ("US power grid", 6594 ),
            ("PGP web of trust (2004)", 24316),
            ("Linux kernel source file includes", 230213),
            ("Enron emails (1999-2003)", 1148072),
            ("Internet autonomous systems (2005)", 11095298),
            ("CS collaborations (DBLP)", 18e6),
            ("Wikipedia hyperlinks", 350e6),
            ("Twitter follower graph (2012)", 20e9),
            ("Facebook social graph (2011)", 68.7e9),
            ("NSA social graph (?)", 1e11),
            ("human connectome (neuronal)", 1e14)
           ]

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(16,6))

for i, (name, radius) in enumerate(objects):
    sgn = 2 * (i % 2) - 1
    ax.annotate(name, xy=(radius,0), xytext=(radius,sgn* (0.5 + random.randint(1,12) * 0.1)), ha='center',
                arrowprops=dict(arrowstyle="->", connectionstyle="arc,angleA=0,armA=30,rad=30", facecolor='gray'),
               color="Maroon")
ax.set_xscale('log')
ax.set_xlim(1.e1,1.e15)
ax.set_ylim(0,4)
ax.axes.get_yaxis().set_visible(False)
ax.axhline(color='k', lw=1)
ax.plot([obj[1] for obj in objects], [0]*len(objects), 'ob', markersize=2)
ax.set_yticks([])
ax.tick_params(length=8)
ax.set_xlabel('edges')
seaborn.despine()
plt.show()

Should be simple enough, but all the code examples I've found so far have not worked, e.g. fig.axes[0].get_yaxis().set_visible(False)

score 10 · Accepted Answer · edited Feb 05 '16 at 21:09

10

The left axis is from seaborn, not matplotlib. You can turn it off using:

seaborn.despine(left=True)

In response to tcaswell comment bellow:

Seaborn adds splines to the plot. The despine command accepts the following args to remove them. However, you have to explicitly tell it to turn off the left or bottom.

seaborn.despine(fig=None, ax=None, top=True, right=True, left=False, bottom=False, offset=None, trim=False)

wherein

top, right, left, bottom : boolean, optional
If True, remove that spine.

edited Feb 05 '16 at 21:09

clstaudt

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answered Feb 05 '16 at 17:22

Ben

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Seaborn is mostly a wrapper on top of matplotlib so your statement is not quite true. – tacaswell Feb 05 '16 at 17:30
Yes, Seaborn uses matplotlib as building-block, providing flexibility. – seufagner Jun 15 '20 at 18:53

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

1

This is a bit of a hack, but appears to get the result you want.

ax.set_frame_on(False) #Remove both axes
ax.axhline(0,color='black') #Put the x axis back

Pulled from two websites:

edited May 23 '17 at 10:32

Community

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answered Feb 05 '16 at 17:20

Charlie Haley

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Hiding the y-axis in this plot

2 Answers2