Random colors by default in matplotlib

Question

I had a look at Kaggle's univariate-plotting-with-pandas. There's this line which generates bar graph.

reviews['province'].value_counts().head(10).plot.bar()

I don't see any color scheme defined specifically. I tried plotting it using jupyter notebook but could see only one color instead of all multiple colors as at Kaggle.

I tried reading the document and online help but couldn't get any method to generate these colors just by the line above.

How do we do that? Is there a config to set this randomness by default?

Answer 1

It seems like the multicoloured bars were the default behaviour in one of the former pandas versions and Kaggle must have used that one for their tutorial (you can read more here).

You can easily recreate the plot by defining a list of standard colours and then using it as an argument in bar.

colors = ['#1f77b4', '#ff7f0e', '#2ca02c', '#d62728', '#9467bd',
          '#8c564b', '#e377c2', '#7f7f7f', '#bcbd22', '#17becf']
reviews['province'].value_counts().head(10).plot.bar(color=colors)

Tested on pandas 0.24.1 and matplotlib 2.2.2.