python - Matplotlib way to annotate bar plots with lines and figures

Question

I would like to create an annotation to a bar chart that compares the value of the bar to two reference values. An overlay such as shown in the picture, a kind of staff gauge, is possible, but I'm open to more elegant solutions.

The bar chart is generated with the pandas API to matplotlib (e.g. data.plot(kind="bar")), so a plus would be if the solution is playing nicely with that.

Answer 1

You may use smaller bars for the target and benchmark indicators. Pandas cannot annotate bars automatically, but you can simply loop over the values and use matplotlib's pyplot.annotate instead.

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

a = np.random.randint(5,15, size=5)
t = (a+np.random.normal(size=len(a))*2).round(2)
b = (a+np.random.normal(size=len(a))*2).round(2)
df = pd.DataFrame({"a":a, "t":t, "b":b})

fig, ax = plt.subplots()


df["a"].plot(kind='bar', ax=ax, legend=True)
df["b"].plot(kind='bar', position=0., width=0.1, color="lightblue",legend=True, ax=ax)
df["t"].plot(kind='bar', position=1., width=0.1, color="purple", legend=True, ax=ax)

for i, rows in df.iterrows():
    plt.annotate(rows["a"], xy=(i, rows["a"]), rotation=0, color="C0")
    plt.annotate(rows["b"], xy=(i+0.1, rows["b"]), color="lightblue", rotation=+20, ha="left")
    plt.annotate(rows["t"], xy=(i-0.1, rows["t"]), color="purple", rotation=-20, ha="right")

ax.set_xlim(-1,len(df))
plt.show()