Controlling Figure Aesthetics

As we mentioned previously, Matplotlib is highly customizable. But it also has the effect that it is very inconvenient, as it can take a long time to adjust all necessary parameters to get your desired visualization. In Seaborn, we can use customized themes and a high-level interface for controlling the appearance of Matplotlib figures.

The following code snippet creates a simple line plot in Matplotlib:

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure()
x1 = [10, 20, 5, 40, 8]
x2 = [30, 43, 9, 7, 20]
plt.plot(x1, label='Group A')
plt.plot(x2, label='Group B')
plt.legend()
plt.show()

This is what the plot looks with Matplotlib's default parameters:

Figure 4.2: Matplotlib line plot

To switch to the Seaborn defaults, simply call the set() function:

%matplotlib inline
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
sns.set()
plt.figure()
x1 = [10, 20, 5, 40, 8]
x2 = [30, 43,...