Seaborn pairplot: how to change legend label text

Question

I'm making a simple pairplot with Seaborn in Python that shows different levels of a categorical variable by the color of plot elements across variables in a Pandas DataFrame. Although the plot comes out exactly as I want it, the categorical variable is binary, which makes the legend quite meaningless to an audience not familiar with the data (categories are naturally labeled as 0 & 1).

An example of my code:

g = sns.pairplot(df, hue='categorical_var', palette='Set3')

Is there a way to change legend label text with pairplot? Or should I use PairGrid, and if so how would I approach this?

Why is 0 and 1 a natural labeling for the categories? Why not use meaningful names? — mwaskom, Nov 07 '16 at 12:17
Because I will need the numerical values for analysis later on. — RF_PY, Nov 07 '16 at 14:42
http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/categorical.html — Paul H, Nov 07 '16 at 17:50
Does this answer your question? [Edit seaborn legend](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/45201514/edit-seaborn-legend) — J. M. Arnold, Feb 14 '21 at 14:09

Raquel · Answer 1 · 2020-05-14T16:40:49.493

1

Found it! It was answered here: Edit seaborn legend

g = sns.pairplot(df, hue='categorical_var', palette='Set3')
g._legend.set_title(new_title)

edited May 14 '20 at 16:40

answered May 14 '20 at 16:27

Raquel

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This code changes the legend title, not the legend labels. But the linked question does concern the labels, so thanks for the link. – Patrick FitzGerald Feb 14 '21 at 10:44

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Feb 05 '17 at 10:30

Since you don't provide a full example of code, nor mock data, I will use my own codes to answer.

First solution

The easiest must be to keep your binary labels for analysis and to create a column with proper names for plotting. Here is a sample code of mine, you should grab the idea:

def transconum(morph):
    if (morph == 'S'):
        return 1.0
    else:
        return 0.0

CompactGroups['MorphNum'] = CompactGroups['MorphGal'].apply(transconum)

Second solution

Another way would be to overwrite labels on the flight. Here is a sample code of mine which works perfectly:

grid = sns.jointplot(x="MorphNum", y="PropS", data=CompactGroups, kind="reg")
grid.set_axis_labels("Central type", "Spiral proportion among satellites")
grid.ax_joint.set_xticks([0, 1, 1])
plt.xticks(range(2), ('$Red$', '$S$'))

just a comment to your first solution: can be reduced into a list comprehension `CompactGroups['MorphNum'] = [1 if i == True else 0 for i in CompactGroups['MorphGal'] == 'S']` — grg rsr, Jul 16 '17 at 09:39

Seaborn pairplot: how to change legend label text

2 Answers2