Increasing space between bins in seaborn distplot

Question

So I have this, probably, simple question. I created a histogram from data out of an excel file with seaborn. Forbetter visualization, I would like to have some space between the bars/bins. Is that possible?

My code looks as followed

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns

%matplotlib inline
from IPython.display import set_matplotlib_formats
set_matplotlib_formats('svg', 'pdf')


df = pd.read_excel('test.xlsx')
sns.set_style("white")
#sns.set_style("dark")
plt.figure(figsize=(12,10))
plt.xlabel('a', fontsize=18)
plt.ylabel('test2', fontsize=18)

plt.title ('tests ^2', fontsize=22)


ax = sns.distplot(st,bins=34, kde=False, hist_kws={'range':(0,1), 'edgecolor':'black', 'alpha':1.0}, axlabel='test1')

A second question though a bit off topic would be, how I get the exponent in the title of the chart to actually be uplifted?

Thanks!

Solution 1

The matplotlib hist function has an argument rwidth

rwidth : scalar or None, optional
The relative width of the bars as a fraction of the bin width.

You can use this inside the distplot via the hist_kws argument.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns

x = np.random.normal(0.5,0.2,1600)

ax = sns.distplot(x,bins=34, kde=False, 
                  hist_kws={"rwidth":0.75,'edgecolor':'black', 'alpha':1.0})

plt.show()

Solution 2

for Seaborn >= 0.11, use shrink parameter. It scales the width of each bar relative to the binwidth by this parameter. The rest will be empty space.

Documentation: https://seaborn.pydata.org/generated/seaborn.histplot.html

edit: OP was originally asking about sns.distplot(), however, it is deprecated in favor of sns.histplot or sns.displot() in the current version >=0.11. Since OP is generating a histogram, both histplot and displot in hist mode will take shrink

Comments

[MERose]

Doesn't work with seaborn >= 0.11 any more, unfortunately. distplot() became displot() or histplot(), and neither passes on the rwidth parameter.

[PatrickT]

2022: The hist_kws argument is available for sns.distplot(), but not for sns.histplot().

[PatrickT]

The OP is asking about sns.displot(), while sns.histplot() takes different arguments.

[PatrickT]

The OP is asking about sns.distplot() not sns.histplot(). As it turns out, they are quite different.

[miro]

@PatrickT thanks for noticing, I have improved the answer.

[PatrickT]

upvote from me. :-)