Plotting with Seaborn for Beginners in Data Science

What is Seaborn ?

Seaborn is a statistics library used to create stunning visualizations for statistical data. It is built on top of Matplotlib and very closely integrates with pandas Dataframes. If you want great publication quality graphs on statistical data with minimum coding, this is the library for you.

I already know Matplotlib. Do I need Seaborn ?

While Matplotlib is the beginner’s toolkit to create plots & Visualizations in Data science for Python, it has its limitations. This is where Seaborn shines, with its publication quality graphics and advanced visualization aspects that will enable you to create stunning quality graphics with very minimal code. All of this with much smaller syntax compared to Matplotlib.

How different is Seaborn from Matplotlib ?

• Matplotlib is limited to basic plotting and its visualization consists of just the core elements of plotting like barcharts, scatter plots and so on. Seaborn on the other hand can do a great deal of visualization and has in-built tools for most of the advanced Data Scientist requirements.

• While Matplotlib is closely modelled from MATLAB (another great but proprietary tool), Seaborn is built from the ground up to be an easy to use tool, leaving behind the legacy inadequacies of Matplotlib.

• While Matplotlib can work easily with both Pandas Data frames and Numpy Arrays, Seaborn is specifically built to handle Data Frames easily. Seaborn has a much more intuitive API to handle Dataframes.

• While Matplotlib provides the most flexibility, Seaborn lets you up and running fast with the mostly used default options.