Create a discrete colorbar in matplotlib

Question

I\'ve tried the other threads, but can\'t work out how to solve. I\'m attempting to create a discrete colorbar. Much of the code appears to be working, a discrete bar does a

Answer 1

Indeed, the fist argument to colorbar should be a ScalarMappable, which would be the scatter plot PathCollection itself.

Setup

import numpy as np
import matplotlib as mpl
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({"x" : np.linspace(0,1,20),
                   "y" : np.linspace(0,1,20),
                   "cluster" : np.tile(np.arange(4),5)})

cmap = mpl.colors.ListedColormap(["navy", "crimson", "limegreen", "gold"])
norm = mpl.colors.BoundaryNorm(np.arange(-0.5,4), cmap.N) 

Pandas plotting

The problem is that pandas does not provide you access to this ScalarMappable directly. So one can catch it from the list of collections in the axes, which is easy if there is only one single collection present: ax.collections[0].

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
df.plot.scatter(x='x', y='y', c='cluster', marker='+', ax=ax, 
                cmap=cmap, norm=norm, s=100, edgecolor ='none', alpha=0.70, colorbar=False)

fig.colorbar(ax.collections[0], ticks=np.linspace(0,3,4))
plt.show()

Matplotlib plotting

One could consider using matplotlib directly to plot the scatter in which case you would directly use the return of the scatter function as argument to colorbar.

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
scatter = ax.scatter(x='x', y='y', c='cluster', marker='+', data=df,
                cmap=cmap, norm=norm, s=100, edgecolor ='none', alpha=0.70)

fig.colorbar(scatter, ticks=np.linspace(0,3,4))
plt.show()

Output in both cases is identical.