pythonpandasseabornbar-chartcountplot

Order categories by count in a countplot

I know that seaborn.countplot has the attribute order which can be set to determine the order of the categories. But what I would like to do is have the categories be in order of descending count. I know that I can accomplish this by computing the count manually (using a groupby operation on the original dataframe, etc.) but I am wondering if this functionality exists with seaborn.countplot.

Solution

  • This functionality is not built into seaborn.countplot as far as I know - the order parameter only accepts a list of strings for the categories, and leaves the ordering logic to the user.

    This is not hard to do with value_counts() provided you have a DataFrame though. For example,

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

sns.set(style='darkgrid')

titanic = sns.load_dataset('titanic')
sns.countplot(x = 'class',
              data = titanic,
              order = titanic['class'].value_counts().index)
plt.show()

    enter image description here