How to Create a Rug Plot in Python with Seaborn

Intro

A rug plot is a simple plot to explore distributions of a continous variable. For example, let's say you want to explore salaries of employees. A rug plot will add a line for each salaray creating a dark dense area where the majority of salaries are located. In this article, we will see how to create a rug plot with Seaborn.

import seaborn as sns

tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
tips.head()

	total_bill	tip	sex	smoker	day	time	size
0	16.99	1.01	Female	No	Sun	Dinner	2
1	10.34	1.66	Male	No	Sun	Dinner	3
2	21.01	3.50	Male	No	Sun	Dinner	3
3	23.68	3.31	Male	No	Sun	Dinner	2
4	24.59	3.61	Female	No	Sun	Dinner	4

The Basic Seaborn Rug Plot

To create a basic rug plot, we use the rugplot method. We then pass the data we want to use and the key of the value we want to plot to the x named parameter. In this example, we create a rug plot from the total_bill column.

sns.rugplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill")

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill'>

Adding Rug Plot to X and Y

We can also plot a second rug plot on the y-axis. In this example, we have the preivous plot and we add the tip column to the y-axis.

sns.rugplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill", y = "tip")

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>

Adding a Second Plot

We can add a second plot to rugplot by first creating a plot then calling the rug plot. Here we add the kdeplot then call rugplot afterwards.

sns.kdeplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill")
sns.rugplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill")

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='Density'>

Here is a second example wiht the scatterplot.

sns.scatterplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill", y = "tip")
sns.rugplot(data = tips, x = "total_bill", y = "tip")

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>

Displaying Groups

We can color different groups or categorical variables by using the hue parameter. In this example we color lunch time as blue and dinner as orange.

sns.rugplot(
    data = tips,
    x = "total_bill",
    y = "tip",
    hue = "time"
)

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>

Changing the Display

We can change the height of the rugplot by using the height parameter.

sns.rugplot(
    data = tips,
    x = "total_bill",
    y = "tip",
    height = .1
)

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>

We can use the clip_on parameter and set it to False to get the rugplot to display outside of the plot.

sns.scatterplot(
    data = tips,
    x = "total_bill",
    y = "tip"
)
sns.rugplot(
    data = tips,
    x = "total_bill",
    y = "tip",
    height = -.02,
    clip_on = False
)

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>

We can also change the line width and alpha using the lw and alpha parameters respectively.

diamonds = sns.load_dataset("diamonds")
sns.rugplot(
    data = diamonds,
    x = "carat",
    y = "price",
    lw = 1,
    alpha = .005
)

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='carat', ylabel='price'>

One final example is changing the palette using the palette parameter. You can find more palletes here: https://seaborn.pydata.org/tutorial/color_palettes.html?highlight=palette#qualitative-color-palettes.

sns.rugplot(
    data = tips,
    x = "total_bill",
    y = "tip",
    hue = "time",
    palette = 'pastel'
)

<AxesSubplot:xlabel='total_bill', ylabel='tip'>