Keep points from overlapping with a swarm plot

A swarm plot offsets each observation to avoid overlap, so you can retain individual values while still seeing the overall shape of the distribution.

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import seaborn as sns
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

tips = sns.load_dataset("tips")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 4))
sns.swarmplot(data=tips, x="day", y="total_bill", hue="sex", dodge=True, ax=ax)

ax.set_xlabel("Day of week")
ax.set_ylabel("Bill total ($)")
ax.set_title("Bill totals by weekday (swarm plot)")
ax.grid(axis="y", alpha=0.2)

fig.tight_layout()

plt.show()

Reading tips #

• The vertical extent of each stack corresponds to local density, and outliers remain visible as individual points.
• With very large data sets, swarm plots become heavy to compute, so sampling or adjusting size may be necessary.
• Setting dodge=True separates each hue category into its own column for easier comparisons.