Importing yellowbrick changes global matplotlib styles

UPDATE: After some investigation, we’ve discovered that Seaborn has rolled back their automatic style changes on import, and we should probably do the same. To fix this issue the following things need to be done:

• remove the automatic style changes from yellowbrick/__init__.py
• create documentation similar to Seaborn’s Controlling Image Aesthetics
• determine how we can use our styles on poof() without changing the global rcParams

Original Issue

This may be intentional behavior. If it is, sorry for the noise! It surprised me though, so maybe it should be in the documentation somewhere.

When you import yellowbrick, it runs yellowbrick/__init__.py which contains this line:

set_aesthetic() # NOTE: modifies mpl.rcParams

This does indeed change matplotlib.rcParams, which means that every other plot generated via matplotlib is altered.

I have a workaround, which is to create a context manager for Yellowbrick plots:

import warnings
import matplotlib as mpl
import yellowbrick

class YellowbrickStyle:
    """
    Context manager for global mpl style state to accommodate Yellowbrick
    """
    def __enter__(self):
        yellowbrick.set_aesthetic()

    def __exit__(self, *args):
        with warnings.catch_warnings():
            warnings.simplefilter('ignore', mpl.MatplotlibDeprecationWarning)
            yellowbrick.reset_orig()

# Importing yellowbrick modifies global mpl style state so reset it immediately
with YellowbrickStyle():
    pass

And then I wrap every use of Yellowbrick in a with YellowbrickStyle(): block, e.g.

with YellowbrickStyle():
        visualizer = yellowbrick.regressor.ResidualsPlot(model)
        visualizer.fit(X=training_X, y=training_y)
        visualizer.score(X=testing_X, y=testing_y)
        visualizer.poof()

This works but it’s a bit of a hassle. Did you mean to change the matplotlib rcParams for every other plot in a project?

[lwgray]

hi @gavsideas Thanks for adding to the discussion. We are on a very short hiatus and will provide feedback once we return. cheers

[joelostblom]

Thanks for looking into this! It would be great if it could be handled the same way as in seaborn, where users have to call seaborn.set() to explicitly modify the global matplotlib rc params. In my limited testing, neither reset_defaults() or reset_origin() successfully reset the styles to the same as when launching a notebook the first time (tested in JupyterLab only, not classic).