Seaborn Adjusting Markers

As you can see here, the X axis labels here are quite unreadable. This will happen regardless of how I adjust the figure size. I’m trying to figure out how to adjust the labeling so that it only shows certain points. The X axis are all numerical between -1 to 1, and I think it would be nice and more viewer friendly to have labels at -1, -.5, 0, .5 and 1.

Is there a way to do this? Thank you!

Here’s my code

sns.set(rc={'figure.figsize':(20,8)})
ax = sns.countplot(musi['Positivity'])
ax.set_xticklabels(ax.get_xticklabels(), rotation=40, ha='right')
plt.tight_layout()
plt.show()

Answer

Basically seaborn is wrapper on matplotlib. You can use matplotlib ticker function to do a Job. Refer the below example.

Let’s Plots tick every 1 spacing.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as ticker
import seaborn as sns
sns.set_theme(style="whitegrid")

x = [0,5,9,10,15]
y = [0,1,2,3,4]

tick_spacing = 1

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,1)
sns.lineplot(x, y)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.MultipleLocator(tick_spacing))
plt.show()

Now Let’s plot ticks every 5 ticks.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as ticker
import seaborn as sns
sns.set_theme(style="whitegrid")

x = [0,5,9,10,15]
y = [0,1,2,3,4]

tick_spacing = 5

fig, ax = plt.subplots(1,1)
sns.lineplot(x, y)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.MultipleLocator(tick_spacing))
plt.show()

P.S.: This solution give you explicit control of the tick spacing via the number given to ticker.MultipleLocater(), allows automatic limit determination, and is easy to read later.