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I have a data set with huge number of features, so analysing the correlation matrix has become very difficult. I want to plot a correlation matrix which we get using dataframe.corr() function from pandas library. Is there any built-in function provided by the pandas library to plot this matrix?

Fabian Rost
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Gaurav Singh
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    Related answers can be found here [Making heatmap from pandas DataFrame](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/12286607/python-making-heatmap-from-dataframe) – joelostblom Jul 13 '18 at 13:20

16 Answers16

412

You can use pyplot.matshow() from matplotlib:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

plt.matshow(dataframe.corr())
plt.show()

Edit:

In the comments was a request for how to change the axis tick labels. Here's a deluxe version that is drawn on a bigger figure size, has axis labels to match the dataframe, and a colorbar legend to interpret the color scale.

I'm including how to adjust the size and rotation of the labels, and I'm using a figure ratio that makes the colorbar and the main figure come out the same height.


EDIT 2: As the df.corr() method ignores non-numerical columns, .select_dtypes(['number']) should be used when defining the x and y labels to avoid an unwanted shift of the labels (included in the code below).

f = plt.figure(figsize=(19, 15))
plt.matshow(df.corr(), fignum=f.number)
plt.xticks(range(df.select_dtypes(['number']).shape[1]), df.select_dtypes(['number']).columns, fontsize=14, rotation=45)
plt.yticks(range(df.select_dtypes(['number']).shape[1]), df.select_dtypes(['number']).columns, fontsize=14)
cb = plt.colorbar()
cb.ax.tick_params(labelsize=14)
plt.title('Correlation Matrix', fontsize=16);

correlation plot example

NicoH
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jrjc
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338

If your main goal is to visualize the correlation matrix, rather than creating a plot per se, the convenient pandas styling options is a viable built-in solution:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np

rs = np.random.RandomState(0)
df = pd.DataFrame(rs.rand(10, 10))
corr = df.corr()
corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm')
# 'RdBu_r', 'BrBG_r', & PuOr_r are other good diverging colormaps

enter image description here

Note that this needs to be in a backend that supports rendering HTML, such as the JupyterLab Notebook.


Styling

You can easily limit the digit precision:

corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm').set_precision(2)

enter image description here

Or get rid of the digits altogether if you prefer the matrix without annotations:

corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm').set_properties(**{'font-size': '0pt'})

enter image description here

The styling documentation also includes instructions of more advanced styles, such as how to change the display of the cell the mouse pointer is hovering over.


Time comparison

In my testing, style.background_gradient() was 4x faster than plt.matshow() and 120x faster than sns.heatmap() with a 10x10 matrix. Unfortunately it doesn't scale as well as plt.matshow(): the two take about the same time for a 100x100 matrix, and plt.matshow() is 10x faster for a 1000x1000 matrix.


Saving

There are a few possible ways to save the stylized dataframe:

  • Return the HTML by appending the render() method and then write the output to a file.
  • Save as an .xslx file with conditional formatting by appending the to_excel() method.
  • Combine with imgkit to save a bitmap
  • Take a screenshot (like I have done here).

Normalize colors across the entire matrix (pandas >= 0.24)

By setting axis=None, it is now possible to compute the colors based on the entire matrix rather than per column or per row:

corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm', axis=None)

enter image description here


Single corner heatmap

Since many people are reading this answer I thought I would add a tip for how to only show one corner of the correlation matrix. I find this easier to read myself, since it removes the redundant information.

# Fill diagonal and upper half with NaNs
mask = np.zeros_like(corr, dtype=bool)
mask[np.triu_indices_from(mask)] = True
corr[mask] = np.nan
(corr
 .style
 .background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm', axis=None, vmin=-1, vmax=1)
 .highlight_null(null_color='#f1f1f1')  # Color NaNs grey
 .set_precision(2))

enter image description here

joelostblom
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    If there was a way to export is as an image, that would have been great! – Kristada673 Jun 27 '18 at 04:43
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    Thanks! You definitely need a diverging palette ```import seaborn as sns corr = df.corr() cm = sns.light_palette("green", as_cmap=True) cm = sns.diverging_palette(220, 20, sep=20, as_cmap=True) corr.style.background_gradient(cmap=cm).set_precision(2)``` – stallingOne Jul 05 '18 at 09:00
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    @stallingOne Good point, I shouldn't have included negative values in the example, I might change that later. Just for reference for people reading this, you don't need to create a custom divergent cmap with seaborn (although the one in the comment above looks pretty slick), you can also use the built-in divergent cmaps from matplotlib, e.g. `corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm')`. There is currently no way to center the cmap on a specific value, which can be a good idea with divergent cmaps. – joelostblom Jul 05 '18 at 13:54
  • @joelostblom I'm getting a `ValueError` with `corr.style.background_gradient(cmap='coolwarm', axis=None)` that I don't get without the `axis=None`. Any idea how to fix that? – rovyko Mar 06 '19 at 18:41
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    @rovyko Are you on pandas >=0.24.0? – joelostblom Mar 06 '19 at 19:17
  • I checked that but I was using the wrong env. My bad, everything works. – rovyko Mar 06 '19 at 19:46
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    These plots are visually great, but @Kristada673 question is quite relevant, how would you export them? – Erfan May 15 '19 at 16:31
  • @Erfan @Kristada673 To save the output you could return the HTML by appending the `.render()` method and then write it to a file, or [combine with `imgkit` to save a bitmap](https://stackoverflow.com/a/50097322/2166823) (or just take a screenshot for less formal purposes). – joelostblom May 16 '19 at 16:42
  • Is there a way to get `xticks` and `yticks` as column names rather than number ? – Hayat Nov 10 '19 at 06:13
  • @Hayat By default, the column names and index from the data frame are displayed so you can change these names using pandas `rename` https://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/reference/api/pandas.DataFrame.rename.html – joelostblom Nov 10 '19 at 06:19
  • when I do `dataframe.columns` it is shows proper cols but when I call `df.corr()` and plot `ticks` are converted to numbers. – Hayat Nov 10 '19 at 06:35
  • @Hayat Please post a new question about this and include the code your are running. Feel free to link it here and I can have a look. – joelostblom Nov 10 '19 at 06:47
  • how can we save this to a file ? – MANU May 20 '20 at 08:33
  • @MANU Please read the "saving" section of the answer for suggestions. – joelostblom May 20 '20 at 15:28
  • @joelostblom I missed that... my bad. – MANU May 20 '20 at 15:38
  • What does it mean when a column's color is black in a cmap='coolwarm' plot? @joelostblom Here's an example: https://gist.github.com/gumdropsteve/b483a739659e62009317df69bdc5de4a – gumdropsteve Aug 03 '20 at 22:35
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    @gumdropsteve It could be NaNs, but please ask a new question for this. – joelostblom Aug 04 '20 at 04:26
  • Thank you, that is cool. How to display these correlation heatmap in a loop to show multiple dataframe? this style can only work for one dataframe in jupyter notebook cell. Even in jupyter notebook cell, can I display multiple heatmap using loop? Thanks – roudan Jan 13 '22 at 15:43
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    @roudan You can use `from IPython.display import display` (or import `display_html`)and then `display(df)` in the loop. https://ipython.readthedocs.io/en/stable/api/generated/IPython.display.html#IPython.display.display – joelostblom Jan 13 '22 at 17:02
  • this is great, you can also set the colour limits manually, instead of using the data range, with e.g. `vmin=-1, vmax=1` – SpinUp Mar 22 '22 at 03:07
113

Seaborn's heatmap version:

import seaborn as sns
corr = dataframe.corr()
sns.heatmap(corr, 
            xticklabels=corr.columns.values,
            yticklabels=corr.columns.values)
rafaelvalle
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    Seaborn heatmap is fancy but it performs poor on large matrices. matshow method of matplotlib is much faster. – anilbey Aug 22 '17 at 22:28
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    Seaborn can automatically infer the ticklabels from the column names. – Tulio Casagrande Oct 02 '18 at 21:32
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    It seems that not all ticklabels are shown always if seaborn is left to automatically infer https://stackoverflow.com/questions/50754471/seaborn-heatmap-not-displaying-all-xticks-and-yticks – janto Sep 14 '21 at 15:21
  • Would be nice to also include normalizing the color from -1 to 1, otherwise the colors will span from the lowest correlation (can be anywhere) to highest correlation (1, on the diagonal). – Nuclear03020704 Oct 24 '21 at 05:32
102

Try this function, which also displays variable names for the correlation matrix:

def plot_corr(df,size=10):
    """Function plots a graphical correlation matrix for each pair of columns in the dataframe.

    Input:
        df: pandas DataFrame
        size: vertical and horizontal size of the plot
    """

    corr = df.corr()
    fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(size, size))
    ax.matshow(corr)
    plt.xticks(range(len(corr.columns)), corr.columns)
    plt.yticks(range(len(corr.columns)), corr.columns)
Community
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Apogentus
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    `plt.xticks(range(len(corr.columns)), corr.columns, rotation='vertical')` if you want vertical orientation of column names on x-axis – nishant Feb 18 '19 at 08:38
  • Another graphical thing, but adding a `plt.tight_layout()` might also be useful for long column names. – user3017048 May 28 '19 at 06:18
94

You can observe the relation between features either by drawing a heat map from seaborn or scatter matrix from pandas.

Scatter Matrix:

pd.scatter_matrix(dataframe, alpha = 0.3, figsize = (14,8), diagonal = 'kde');

If you want to visualize each feature's skewness as well - use seaborn pairplots.

sns.pairplot(dataframe)

Sns Heatmap:

import seaborn as sns

f, ax = pl.subplots(figsize=(10, 8))
corr = dataframe.corr()
sns.heatmap(corr, mask=np.zeros_like(corr, dtype=np.bool), cmap=sns.diverging_palette(220, 10, as_cmap=True),
            square=True, ax=ax)

The output will be a correlation map of the features. i.e. see the below example.

enter image description here

The correlation between grocery and detergents is high. Similarly:

Pdoducts With High Correlation:
  1. Grocery and Detergents.
Products With Medium Correlation:
  1. Milk and Grocery
  2. Milk and Detergents_Paper
Products With Low Correlation:
  1. Milk and Deli
  2. Frozen and Fresh.
  3. Frozen and Deli.

From Pairplots: You can observe same set of relations from pairplots or scatter matrix. But from these we can say that whether the data is normally distributed or not.

enter image description here

Note: The above is same graph taken from the data, which is used to draw heatmap.

phanindravarma
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For completeness, the simplest solution i know with seaborn as of late 2019, if one is using Jupyter:

import seaborn as sns
sns.heatmap(dataframe.corr())
Marcin
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11

Surprised to see no one mentioned more capable, interactive and easier to use alternatives.

A) You can use plotly:

  1. Just two lines and you get:

  2. interactivity,

  3. smooth scale,

  4. colors based on whole dataframe instead of individual columns,

  5. column names & row indices on axes,

  6. zooming in,

  7. panning,

  8. built-in one-click ability to save it as a PNG format,

  9. auto-scaling,

  10. comparison on hovering,

  11. bubbles showing values so heatmap still looks good and you can see values wherever you want:

import plotly.express as px
fig = px.imshow(df.corr())
fig.show()

enter image description here

B) You can also use Bokeh:

All the same functionality with a tad much hassle. But still worth it if you do not want to opt-in for plotly and still want all these things:

from bokeh.plotting import figure, show, output_notebook
from bokeh.models import ColumnDataSource, LinearColorMapper
from bokeh.transform import transform
output_notebook()
colors = ['#d7191c', '#fdae61', '#ffffbf', '#a6d96a', '#1a9641']
TOOLS = "hover,save,pan,box_zoom,reset,wheel_zoom"
data = df.corr().stack().rename("value").reset_index()
p = figure(x_range=list(df.columns), y_range=list(df.index), tools=TOOLS, toolbar_location='below',
           tooltips=[('Row, Column', '@level_0 x @level_1'), ('value', '@value')], height = 500, width = 500)

p.rect(x="level_1", y="level_0", width=1, height=1,
       source=data,
       fill_color={'field': 'value', 'transform': LinearColorMapper(palette=colors, low=data.value.min(), high=data.value.max())},
       line_color=None)
color_bar = ColorBar(color_mapper=LinearColorMapper(palette=colors, low=data.value.min(), high=data.value.max()), major_label_text_font_size="7px",
                     ticker=BasicTicker(desired_num_ticks=len(colors)),
                     formatter=PrintfTickFormatter(format="%f"),
                     label_standoff=6, border_line_color=None, location=(0, 0))
p.add_layout(color_bar, 'right')

show(p)

enter image description here

Hamza
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10

You can use imshow() method from matplotlib

import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use('ggplot')

plt.imshow(X.corr(), cmap=plt.cm.Reds, interpolation='nearest')
plt.colorbar()
tick_marks = [i for i in range(len(X.columns))]
plt.xticks(tick_marks, X.columns, rotation='vertical')
plt.yticks(tick_marks, X.columns)
plt.show()
Ralph Deint
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Khandelwal-manik
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If you dataframe is df you can simply use:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

plt.figure(figsize=(15, 10))
sns.heatmap(df.corr(), annot=True)
Hrvoje
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3

statmodels graphics also gives a nice view of correlation matrix

import statsmodels.api as sm
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

corr = dataframe.corr()
sm.graphics.plot_corr(corr, xnames=list(corr.columns))
plt.show()
Shahriar Miraj
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Along with other methods it is also good to have pairplot which will give scatter plot for all the cases-

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
rs = np.random.RandomState(0)
df = pd.DataFrame(rs.rand(10, 10))
sns.pairplot(df)
2

I think there are many good answers but I added this answer to those who need to deal with specific columns and to show a different plot.

import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import pandas as pd
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

rs = np.random.RandomState(0)
df = pd.DataFrame(rs.rand(18, 18))
df= df.iloc[: , [3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,17]].copy()
corr = df.corr()
plt.figure(figsize=(11,8))
sns.heatmap(corr, cmap="Greens",annot=True)
plt.show()

enter image description here

I_Al-thamary
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Form correlation matrix, in my case zdf is the dataframe which i need perform correlation matrix.

corrMatrix =zdf.corr()
corrMatrix.to_csv('sm_zscaled_correlation_matrix.csv');
html = corrMatrix.style.background_gradient(cmap='RdBu').set_precision(2).render()

# Writing the output to a html file.
with open('test.html', 'w') as f:
   print('<!DOCTYPE html><html lang="en"><head><meta charset="UTF-8"><meta name="viewport" content="width=device-widthinitial-scale=1.0"><title>Document</title></head><style>table{word-break: break-all;}</style><body>' + html+'</body></html>', file=f)

Then we can take screenshot. or convert html to an image file.

smsivaprakaash
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-1

You can use heatmap() from seaborn to see the correlation b/w different features:

import matplot.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns

co_matrics=dataframe.corr()
plot.figure(figsize=(15,20))
sns.heatmap(co_matrix, square=True, cbar_kws={"shrink": .5})
10 Rep
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-2

Please check below readable code

import numpy as np
import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.figure(figsize=(36, 26))
heatmap = sns.heatmap(df.corr(), vmin=-1, vmax=1, annot=True)
heatmap.set_title('Correlation Heatmap', fontdict={'fontsize':12}, pad=12)```

  [1]: https://i.stack.imgur.com/I5SeR.png
-2
corrmatrix = df.corr()
corrmatrix *= np.tri(*corrmatrix.values.shape, k=-1).T
corrmatrix = corrmatrix.stack().sort_values(ascending = False).reset_index()
corrmatrix.columns = ['Признак 1', 'Признак 2', 'Корреляция']
corrmatrix[(corrmatrix['Корреляция'] >= 0.7) + (corrmatrix['Корреляция'] <= -0.7)]
drop_columns = corrmatrix[(corrmatrix['Корреляция'] >= 0.82) + (corrmatrix['Корреляция'] <= -0.7)]['Признак 2']
df.drop(drop_columns, axis=1, inplace=True)
corrmatrix[(corrmatrix['Корреляция'] >= 0.7) + (corrmatrix['Корреляция'] <= -0.7)]
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    Your answer could be improved with additional supporting information. Please [edit] to add further details, such as citations or documentation, so that others can confirm that your answer is correct. You can find more information on how to write good answers [in the help center](/help/how-to-answer). – Community Nov 11 '21 at 19:01
  • Add explanations to your code, explain why it's better than the accepted answer, and make sure to use English in the code. – gshpychka Nov 12 '21 at 17:18