How to change order of plots in pandas hist command

Question

I'm trying to plot a set of histograms for a dataframe with 25 columns named "Feature_1","Feature_2",...."Feature_25". When I use df.hist() it sorts individual histograms by their names so they are plotted in the following order: "Feature_1",""Feature_10","Feature_11"..."Feature_2","Feature_20",... which is not what I need.

How do I change the sorting order? Passing columns parameter doesn't change anything.

I solved the problem by using matplotlib directly but that's not what I would prefer to do each time I need to plot several histograms.

Answer 1

You could instead make repeated calls to hist with individual columns. Not sure if that fits all of your needs.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':[1,1,1,1,3],
                  'b':[1,1,2,1,3],
                  'c':[2,2,2,1,3],
                  })

df[['c']].hist()
df[['a']].hist()
df[['b']].hist()

Just iterate through the list of the columns in the order you would like

my_list = ['c','a','b']
for each in my_list:
    df[[each]].hist()

Answer 2

Try making the columns index categorical, then plotting with sort_columns True.

import pandas as pd

df = pd.DataFrame({'a':[1,2], 'b':[30,10]})
df.columns = pd.CategoricalIndex(['b', 'a'], ordered=True)
df.plot.hist(sort_columns=True, subplots=True)