How to provide axis for seaborn clustermap

Question

I want to provide the plot axes for a seaborn clustermap. The docs say that additional arguments are passed to the heatmap function. The docs of the heatmap function mention the keyword argument ax. Which is why I call the clustermap function with the keyword argmument ax=plt.gca(). However this will result in the following error:

  1182         # Setting ax_cbar=None in clustermap call implies no colorbar
   1183         kws.setdefault("cbar", self.ax_cbar is not None)
-> 1184         heatmap(self.data2d, ax=self.ax_heatmap, cbar_ax=self.ax_cbar,
   1185                 cbar_kws=colorbar_kws, mask=self.mask,
   1186                 xticklabels=xtl, yticklabels=ytl, annot=annot, **kws)

TypeError: heatmap() got multiple values for keyword argument 'ax'

Thus I was wondering how to correctly pass the axis argument to the clustermap function?

Below is a minimal example to reproduce the error.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns; sns.set_theme(color_codes=True)

iris = sns.load_dataset("iris")

species = iris.pop("species")
plt.figure()
g = sns.clustermap(iris, ax=plt.gca())
plt.show()

PS.: Without the additional ax argument the plot works fine.

You can't provide a custom `ax` because the figure-level function creates a complete new figure with its own axes. There are, however, parameters to `clustermap` that influence the relative sizes and some positioning. If that's insufficient, you can manipulate and move the axes afterwards. — JohanC, Jul 04 '21 at 10:10
Associated / duplicate question of [seaborn displot() is not plotting within defined subplots](https://stackoverflow.com/q/63895392/7758804) — Trenton McKinney, Jul 04 '21 at 17:49

score 2 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 04 '21 at 07:32

This is not possible as seaborn.clustermap is a figure level plotting function. There is one axes for the heat map and one for each tree.

What exactly would you like to achieve? You can always create your clustermap first and then modify it to add other axes.

How to provide axis for seaborn clustermap

1 Answers1