regression: bar plot with multi-column category doesn't work anymore

Code Sample, a copy-pastable example if possible

Doing a bar plot using a multi-column category used to work

df.plot.barh(x=['fruit', 'animal'], y='size')

In pandas 0.22.0:

since pandas 0.23.0:

Is it intended that this stopped working? I kind of liked the feature.

[soxofaan]

@daminisatya yes, as far as I know this is not yet resolved

[TomAugspurger]

Allowing multiple x might make sense for bar / barh.

FWIW, I would personally do this with df.set_index([‘fruit’, ‘animal’])[‘size’].plot.bar()

On Wed, Jun 13, 2018 at 4:12 AM, Stefaan Lippens [e-mail] wrote:

@MasonGallo https://github.com/MasonGallo : I just used barh to make sure the screenshot was easily readable, The “feature” also used to work for standard bar in pandas 0.22: [image: screen shot 2018-06-13 at 10 48 04] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/44946/41340291-521128e2-6ef7-11e8-821e-be14f586f56e.png

The change was intentional to conform with the api & docs

I understand for the use case of line and scatter plots, but for categorical plots like bar (and pie see lower), I think it would be an interesting feature to bring back support for multi-column based labels. Is there interest for that @TomAugspurger https://github.com/TomAugspurger ?

The signature of barh in pandas is quite confusing to me

In my mind, the x/y handling in barh makes sense as I see barh as a flipped version of bar: the x-axis is drawn vertically and y-axis is drawn horizontally. During data exploration, I usually switch between bar and barh functions names to improve readability of the labels, and in that process I don’t want to also change the arguments of those functions. That being said, I think the axis handling of barh is probably another discussion and out of scope of this ticket.

For completeness I also tried it out with pie, but there the x argument seems to be ignored completely, so it kind of works with both 0.22 and 0.23. However, the pie piece labels come from the index instead of the given x column. But that is probably another (known) issue. [image: screen shot 2018-06-13 at 10 49 45] https://user-images.githubusercontent.com/44946/41340518-e0ed1c4c-6ef7-11e8-9b93-ed97ea6b3bca.png

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