How does one insert statistical annotations (stars or p-values) into matplotlib / seaborn plots?

Question

This seems like a trivial question, but I've been searching for a while and can't seem to find an answer. It also seems like something that should be a standard part of these packages. Does anyone know if there is a standard way to include statistical annotation between distribution plots in seaborn?

For example, between two box or swarmplots?

Answer 1

Here how to add statistical annotation to a Seaborn box plot:

import seaborn as sns, matplotlib.pyplot as plt

tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")
sns.boxplot(x="day", y="total_bill", data=tips, palette="PRGn")

# statistical annotation
x1, x2 = 2, 3   # columns 'Sat' and 'Sun' (first column: 0, see plt.xticks())
y, h, col = tips['total_bill'].max() + 2, 2, 'k'
plt.plot([x1, x1, x2, x2], [y, y+h, y+h, y], lw=1.5, c=col)
plt.text((x1+x2)*.5, y+h, "ns", ha='center', va='bottom', color=col)

plt.show()

And here the result:

Answer 2

One may also be interested in adding several annotations to different pairs of boxes. In such a case, it might be useful to handle the placement of the different lines and texts in the y-axis automatically. I and other contributors wrote a small function to handle these cases (see Github repo), which correctly stacks the lines one on top of each other without overlapping. Annotations can be either inside or outside the plot, and several statistical tests are implemented: Mann-Whitney and t-test (independent and paired). Here is one minimal example.

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn as sns
from statannot import add_stat_annotation

sns.set(style="whitegrid")
df = sns.load_dataset("tips")

x = "day"
y = "total_bill"
order = ['Sun', 'Thur', 'Fri', 'Sat']
ax = sns.boxplot(data=df, x=x, y=y, order=order)
add_stat_annotation(ax, data=df, x=x, y=y, order=order,
                    box_pairs=[("Thur", "Fri"), ("Thur", "Sat"), ("Fri", "Sun")],
                    test='Mann-Whitney', text_format='star', loc='outside', verbose=2)

x = "day"
y = "total_bill"
hue = "smoker"
ax = sns.boxplot(data=df, x=x, y=y, hue=hue)
add_stat_annotation(ax, data=df, x=x, y=y, hue=hue,
                    box_pairs=[(("Thur", "No"), ("Fri", "No")),
                                 (("Sat", "Yes"), ("Sat", "No")),
                                 (("Sun", "No"), ("Thur", "Yes"))
                                ],
                    test='t-test_ind', text_format='full', loc='inside', verbose=2)
plt.legend(loc='upper left', bbox_to_anchor=(1.03, 1))