You can look at the matplotlib documentation, which isn’t too bad, but this might also be helpful.

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

%matplotlib inline

df = pd.read_csv("classwork/countries.csv")
df.head(3)

	country	continent	gdp_per_capita	life_expectancy	population
0	Afghanistan	Asia	663	54.863	22856302
1	Albania	Europe	4195	74.200	3071856
2	Algeria	Africa	5098	68.963	30533827

Plotting

Ignore the fact that this is a really dumb plot of nothing.

df.plot()

<matplotlib.axes._subplots.AxesSubplot at 0x10e2db4e0>

png

Removing the legend

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend_.remove()

png

Moving the legend

loc=… * 'best' * 'upper right' * 'upper left' * 'lower left' * 'lower right' * 'right' * 'center left' * 'center right' * 'lower center' * 'upper center' * 'center'

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(loc='lower right')

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10e2446a0>

png

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(loc='center left')

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10f0ae9e8>

png

Changing the title of the legend

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(title='This is a legend')

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10f269cc0>

png

Making it not so busy and complex and shadow-y etc

You can also use an rcParams with a legend.frameon value of False

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(frameon=False)

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10f8344a8>

png

Make it horizontal instead of vertical

ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(ncol=5, loc='upper center')

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x10fc0a710>

png

Push it outside

# bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, 1)
# 50% of the way left -> right
# 100% of the way bottom -> top
ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(ncol=5, 
          loc='upper center',
          bbox_to_anchor=(0.5, 1.0),
          bbox_transform=plt.gcf().transFigure)

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x110458c50>

png

# bbox_to_anchor=(1.2, 0.5)
# 120% of the way left -> right
# 50% of the way bottom -> top
ax = df.plot()
ax.legend(loc='lower right',
          bbox_to_anchor=(1.2, 0.5),
          bbox_transform=plt.gcf().transFigure)

<matplotlib.legend.Legend at 0x110efe2b0>

png

Other options?

Run ax.legend? to see a lot lot lot more.