Seaborn: swarmplot doesn't recognize `hue` when either the `x` or `y` parameter is omitted

[izaakm]

Similar to the example for swarmplot, I would expect the following to color points by the "sex" column:

tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
ax = sns.swarmplot(y="total_bill", hue="sex", data=tips)

But all points are the same color.

[mwaskom]

No, it doesn't, sorry.

[izaakm]

This seemed like a bug to me; is this the expected/intended behavior?

If this is the intended behavior, could you help me understand why this happens (so that I can try to figure out how to get the behavior that I want)? Any help would be appreciated.

[greg-pf]

@izaakm

I ran into this quirk as well and solved it by omitting the data parameter in favor of directly supplying x, y, and hue with one of x, y being populated with dummy data.

# `hue` is ignored
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
sns.swarmplot(y="total_bill", hue="sex", data=tips)
plt.show()

# `hue` is shown
tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
sns.swarmplot(y=tips["total_bill"], hue=tips["sex"], x=[""]*len(tips))
plt.show()

[mwaskom]

Yes that will, work, though actually you don't have to omit data; you should be able to mix and match specifying variables with vectors or references to data.

[izaakm]

Thanks @greg-pf, nice work-around!

[sverchkov]

@mwaskom even though you don't consider it to be a bug, would you consider a pull request to fix this?

[davidevaleriani]

This is still happening. Any plan to fix it in the future?

[mwaskom]

No.