Seaborn PointPlot Category Ordering Issue

Question

I have been trying to use pointplot in Seaborn and in general it does what I need and I'm very impressed with the functionality.

My use case is fairly standard:

sns.pointplot(x="Category_1", y="Parameter", hue="Category 2", data=df);

My issue is that the Category I use for the hue contains strings in the form:

"1 string1", "2 string2", "3 string3", etc....

This is by design so that I can get a particular order if I sort. However when I run the Seaborn function the order is different.

By what logic does Seaborn order this, and is there a way for forcing a desired order. If I do:

A = df.Category2.unique()
A.sort()

I get the list order that I want.

Ben

Answer 1

As explained in the tutorial, categorical plotting functions follow a set of rules to determine the order of plot elements:

• If a sequence of categories is passed to the order parameter, that order is used.
• If the variable is a pandas Categorical with an assigned category order, that order is used.
• If the variable is numeric, the values are shown in sorted order
• Otherwise, the values are shown in the order that they appear in the DataFrame.