pandas - boxplot median color settings issues

Question

I\'m running Pandas 0.16.2 and Matplotlib 1.4.3. I have this issue coloring the median of the boxplot generated by the following code:

df = pd.DataFrame(np.rando         


        

Answer 1

Actually the following workaround works well, returning a dict from the boxplot command:

df = pd.DataFrame(np.random.rand(10, 5), columns=['A', 'B', 'C', 'D', 'E'])

fig, ax = plt.subplots()

bp = df.boxplot(return_type='dict')

and then assign directly colors and linewidth to the medians with:

[[item.set_color('r') for item in bp[key]['medians']] for key in bp.keys()]
[[item.set_linewidth(0.8) for item in bp[key]['medians']] for key in bp.keys()]

Answer 2

Looking at the code for DataFrame.boxplot() there is some special code to handle the colors of the different elements that supersedes the kws passed to matplotlib's boxplot. In theory, there seem to be a way to pass a color= argument containing a dictionary with keys being 'boxes', 'whiskers', 'medians', 'caps' but I can't seem to get it to work when calling boxplot() directly.

However, this seem to work:

df.plot(kind='box', color={'medians': 'blue'}, 
        medianprops={'linestyle': '--', 'linewidth': 5})

see Pandas Boxplot Examples