python - Emulating deprecated seaborn distplots

Question

Seaborn distplot is now deprecated and will be removed in a future version. It is suggested to use histplot (or displot as a figure-level plot) as an alternative. But the presets differ between distplot and histplot:

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

x_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10]
df = pd.DataFrame({"X": x_list, "Y": range(len(x_list))})

f, (ax_dist, ax_hist) = plt.subplots(2, sharex=True)

sns.distplot(df["X"], ax=ax_dist)
ax_dist.set_title("old distplot")
sns.histplot(data=df, x="X", ax=ax_hist)
ax_hist.set_title("new histplot")

plt.show()

So, how do we have to configure histplot to replicate the output of the deprecated distplot?

Answer 1

Since I spent some time on this, I thought I share this so that others can easily adapt this approach:

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

x_list = [1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 7, 9, 9, 9, 10]
df = pd.DataFrame({"X": x_list, "Y": range(len(x_list))})

f, (ax_dist, ax_hist) = plt.subplots(2, sharex=True)

sns.distplot(df["X"], ax=ax_dist)
ax_dist.set_title("old distplot")
_, FD_bins = np.histogram(x_list, bins="fd")
bin_nr = min(len(FD_bins)-1, 50)
sns.histplot(data=df, x="X", ax=ax_hist, bins=bin_nr, stat="density", alpha=0.4, kde=True, kde_kws={"cut": 3})
ax_hist.set_title("new histplot")

plt.show()

Sample output:

The main changes are

• bins=bin_nr - determine the histogram bins using the Freedman Diaconis Estimator and restrict the upper limit to 50
• stat="density" - show density instead of count in the histogram
• alpha=0.4 - for the same transparency
• kde=True - add a kernel density plot
• kde_kws={"cut": 3} - extend the kernel density plot beyond the histogram limits

Regarding the bin estimation with bins="fd", I am not sure that this is indeed the method used by distplot. Comments and corrections are more than welcome.

I removed **{"linewidth": 0} because distplot has, as pointed out by @mwaskom in a comment, an edgecolor line around the histogram bars that can be set by matplotlib to the default facecolor. So, you have to sort this out according to your style preferences.