Quick Guide to Labelling Data Points for Common Seaborn Plots

Make plots more readable and easily understandable

In the course of my data exploration adventures, I find myself looking at such plots (below), which is great for observing trend but it makes it difficult to make out where and what each data point is.

Seaborn’s flights dataset will be used for the purposes of demonstration.

For increased ease and convenience in creating some plots, some additional data frames can be created.

Plotting a graph of passengers per year:

At times, it would be preferable for the data label to be more visible, which can be achieved by adding a background colour to the data labels:

Plotting a histogram of the frequency of passengers on each flight:

An additional information that might be beneficial to reflect in the graph as well is the mean line of the dataset:

Vertical Bar Plot

Plotting the total number of passengers for each year:

Horizontal Bar Plot

Plotting the average number of passengers on flights each month:

It might be beneficial to add data labels to some plots (especially bar plots), it would be good to experiment and test out different configurations (such as using labels only for certain meaningful points, instead of labelling everything) and not overdo the labelling, especially if there are many points. A clean and informative graph is usually more preferable than a cluttered one.

Revision History

28 Aug 2022: revised histrogram code to use histplot instead of the to-be depreciated distplot

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