What is the necessity of plt.figure() in matplotlib?

Question

plt.figure(figsize=(10,8))  plt.scatter(df['attacker_size'][df['year'] == 298],         # attacker size in year 298 as the y axis         df['defender_size'][df['year'] == 298],         # the marker as         marker='x',         # the color         color='b',         # the alpha         alpha=0.7,         # with size         s = 124,         # labelled this         label='Year 298') 

In the above snippet of code collected from Scatterplot in Matplotlib, what is the necessity of plt.figure()?

Answer 1

The purpose of using plt.figure() is to create a figure object.

The whole figure is regarded as the figure object. It is necessary to explicitly use plt.figure() when we want to tweak the size of the figure and when we want to add multiple Axes objects in a single figure.

# in order to modify the size fig = plt.figure(figsize=(12,8)) # adding multiple Axes objects   fig, ax_lst = plt.subplots(2, 2)  # a figure with a 2x2 grid of Axes 

Parts of a Figure