I’m trying to use my own labels for a Seaborn barplot with the following code:

import pandas as pd
import seaborn as sns

fake = pd.DataFrame({'cat': ['red', 'green', 'blue'], 'val': [1, 2, 3]})
fig = sns.barplot(x = 'val', y = 'cat', 
                  data = fake, 
                  color = 'black')
fig.set_axis_labels('Colors', 'Values')

However, I get an error that:

AttributeError: 'AxesSubplot' object has no attribute 'set_axis_labels'

What gives?

Seaborn’s barplot returns an axis-object (not a figure). This means you can do the following:

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

fake = pd.DataFrame({'cat': ['red', 'green', 'blue'], 'val': [1, 2, 3]})
ax = sns.barplot(x = 'val', y = 'cat', 
              data = fake, 
              color = 'black')
ax.set(xlabel='common xlabel', ylabel='common ylabel')
plt.show()

One can avoid the AttributeError brought about by set_axis_labels() method by using the matplotlib.pyplot.xlabel and matplotlib.pyplot.ylabel.

matplotlib.pyplot.xlabel sets the x-axis label while the matplotlib.pyplot.ylabel sets the y-axis label of the current axis.

Solution code:

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

fake = pd.DataFrame({'cat': ['red', 'green', 'blue'], 'val': [1, 2, 3]})
fig = sns.barplot(x = 'val', y = 'cat', data = fake, color = 'black')
plt.xlabel("Colors")
plt.ylabel("Values")
plt.title("Colors vs Values") # You can comment this line out if you don't need title
plt.show(fig)

Output figure:

You can also set the title of your chart by adding the title parameter as follows

ax.set(xlabel='common xlabel', ylabel='common ylabel', title='some title')