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In Seaborn plots, axis labels can be rotated by adjusting the parameter ‘rot’ in the set_xticklabels or set_yticklabels function. This parameter takes an integer value which represents the angle in degrees by which the label should be rotated. For example, setting rot=45 will rotate the labels 45 degrees.
You can use the following basic syntax to rotate the axis labels in a plot in :
my_plot.set_xticklabels(my_plot.get_xticklabels(), rotation=45)
The following example shows how to use this syntax in practice.
Example: How to Rotate Axis Labels in Seaborn Plot
Suppose we have the following pandas DataFrame that contains information about the points scored by basketball players on various teams:
import pandas as pd
#create DataFrame
df = pd.DataFrame({'team': ['Mavericks', 'Mavericks', 'Mavericks',
'Mavericks', 'Warriors', 'Warriors',
'Blazers', 'Blazers', 'Kings',
'some_really_really_long_name'],
'points': [22, 14, 9, 7, 29, 20, 30, 34, 19, 12]})
#view DataFrame
print(df)
team points
0 Mavericks 22
1 Mavericks 14
2 Mavericks 9
3 Mavericks 7
4 Warriors 29
5 Warriors 20
6 Blazers 30
7 Blazers 34
8 Kings 19
9 some_really_really_long_name 12
We can use the countplot() function in seaborn to create a plot that displays the count of each team in the DataFrame:
import seaborn as sns #create seaborn countplot my_plot = sns.countplot(data=df, x='team')
Since one of the team names is extremely long, it overlaps another team name on the x-axis.
To get around this, we can use the following code to rotate the x-axis labels:
import seaborn as sns #create seaborn countplot my_plot = sns.countplot(data=df, x='team') #rotate x-axis labels my_plot.set_xticklabels(my_plot.get_xticklabels(), rotation=45)
Notice that each of the x-axis labels are now rotated 45 degrees.
If we’d like, we can also use the horizontalalignment argument to shift the x-axis labels to the left:
import seaborn as sns #create seaborn countplot my_plot = sns.countplot(data=df, x='team') #rotate x-axis labels my_plot.set_xticklabels(my_plot.get_xticklabels(), rotation=45, horizontalalignment='right')
Note: If you have trouble importing seaborn in a Jupyter notebook, you may first need to run the command %pip install seaborn.
The following tutorials explain how to perform other common tasks in seaborn: