pythonmatplotlibseabornboxplotstripplot

How to remove the duplicate legend when overlaying boxplot and stripplot

One of the coolest things you can easily make in seaborn is boxplot + stripplot combination:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import pandas as pd

tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

sns.stripplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker",
data=tips, jitter=True,
palette="Set2", dodge=True,linewidth=1,edgecolor='gray')

sns.boxplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker",
data=tips,palette="Set2",fliersize=0)

plt.legend(bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), loc=2, borderaxespad=0.);

enter image description here

Unfortunately, as you can see above, it produced double legend, one for boxplot, one for stripplot. Obviously, it looks ridiculous and redundant. But I cannot seem to find a way to get rid of stripplot legend and only leave boxplot legend. Probably, I can somehow delete items from plt.legend, but I cannot find it in the documentation.

Solution

  • You can get what handles/labels should exist in the legend before you actually draw the legend itself. You then draw the legend only with the specific ones you want.

    import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
import pandas as pd
    
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

sns.stripplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker", data=tips, jitter=True, palette="Set2", dodge=True, linewidth=1, edgecolor='gray')

# Get the ax object to use later.
ax = sns.boxplot(x="day", y="total_bill", hue="smoker", data=tips, palette="Set2", fliersize=0)

# Get the handles and labels. For this example it'll be 2 tuples
# of length 4 each.
handles, labels = ax.get_legend_handles_labels()

# When creating the legend, only use the first two elements
# to effectively remove the last two.
l = plt.legend(handles[0:2], labels[0:2], bbox_to_anchor=(1.05, 1), loc=2, borderaxespad=0.)

    example plot