Plot a bar chart in matplotlib

Plot a Bar Chart using Matplotlib

A bar chart is used to display categorical data using rectangular bars with lengths/heights proportional to the values they represent. In this tutorial, we’ll look at how to plot a bar chart in python with matplotlib through some examples.

Matplotlib is a visualization library in python offering a number of chart options to display your data. To plot a bar chart you can use matplotlib pyplot’s bar() function. The following is the syntax:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.bar(x, height)

Here, x is the sequence of x-coordinates (or labels) to be used and height is the sequence of heights for each x. There are a number of other parameters as well that help you customize the plot. For instance, you can change the width of the bars with the width parameter or change the color of the bars using the color parameter, etc. (see the examples below):

Let’s look at some examples of creating a bar chart with matplotlib.

Let’s say you want to plot a bar chart of the number of championship victories of five of the most celebrated NBA players. Let’s create a bar chart by passing only the names and championship counts and keeping all other parameters as default.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players, titles)
plt.show()

Output:

Bar chart of championship counts with other parameters as default

We get a neat bar graph with the height of the bars representing the championship victories. Let’s add some basic formatting to this chart like axis labels and title to make it more clear.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players, titles)
# set axis labels
plt.ylabel("Rings")
# set chart title
plt.title("Championship Victories of NBA greats")
plt.show()

Output:

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Bar chart with chart title and y-axis label.

Note that we didn’t add labels to the x-axis as it’s pretty clear that it represents the names of NBA players.

You can customize the width of the bars using the width parameter which takes either a scaler (if you want the same width for all bars) or a sequence of scalers depicting the width of each bar. By default, it is 0.8, so, pass a smaller value if you want to decrease the width or a larger value if you want to increase the width.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players, titles, width=0.6)
# set axis labels
plt.ylabel("Rings")
# set chart title
plt.title("Championship Victories of NBA greats")
plt.show()

Output:

Bar chart with thinner bars

You can see the bars here are comparatively thinner than the ones in the previous example since we passed 0.6, a value smaller than the default width of 0.8

You can customize the bar color when plotting with the bar() function by using the color parameter. For instance, if you want the bars to be colored purple:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players, titles, color='purple')
# set axis labels
plt.ylabel("Rings")
# set chart title
plt.title("Championship Victories of NBA greats")
plt.show()

Output:

Bar chart with purple colored bars

You can also specify a different color for each bar by passing the respective colors as a sequence to the color parameter.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]
colors = ['gold', 'gold', 'red', 'green', 'green']

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players, titles, color=colors)
# set axis labels
plt.ylabel("Rings")
# set chart title
plt.title("Championship Victories of NBA greats")
plt.show()

Output:

Bar chart with different colored bars

To plot a bar chart with the bars in sorted order you need to sort your data before passing it to the bar() function. For instance, to show a bar chart in ascending order of championship wins:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

# NBA championship counts
players = ['Kobe Bryant', 'LeBron James', 'Michael Jordan', 
           'Larry Bird', 'Bill Russell']
titles = [5,4,6,3,11]

# Sort the lists
titles_ordered = sorted(titles)
players_ordered = [x for _, x in sorted(zip(titles, players))]

# plot a bar chart
plt.bar(players_ordered, titles_ordered)
# set axis labels
plt.ylabel("Rings")
# set chart title
plt.title("Championship Victories of NBA greats")
plt.show()

Output:

Bar chart with bars sorted in ascending order.

In the above example, you can see that we first sort the title counts and then sort the names corresponding to the sorted titles. The sorted lists are saved as separate lists which are then passed to the bar() function.

For more on plotting bar chart with matplotlib’s bar() function refer to its documentation.

With this, we come to the end of this tutorial. The code examples and results presented in this tutorial have been implemented in a Jupyter Notebook with a python (version 3.8.3) kernel having matplotlib version 3.2.2


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Author

  • Piyush Raj

    Piyush is a data professional passionate about using data to understand things better and make informed decisions. He has experience working as a Data Scientist in the consulting domain and holds an engineering degree from IIT Roorkee. His hobbies include watching cricket, reading, and working on side projects.

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