[Bug] Plotting categorical columns includes empty categories

[Yazan-Sharaya]

[Bug] Plotting categorical columns includes empty categories

[mwaskom]

This is fully intentional, you can dig up the original thread on the introduction of categorical support where it was discussed at length.

[jhncls]

@Yazan-Sharaya
Sometimes, for consistency between plots, you want to see the unused categories. And sometimes, as in your case, you don't want to see them.

One way to only show the used categories way changes the dataframe:

filtered_df['Countries'] = filtered_df['Countries'].cat.remove_unused_categories()

An alternative way uses order= to restrict the plot to the desired categories:

sns.countplot(filtered_df, x='Countries', order=filtered_df['Countries'].unique())

[mwaskom]

Thanks @jhncls