How to change the colormap of a pie chart?

Question

Simple question here, I am creating a pie chart in pandas for the value counts of a dataset's regional spread:

df['region'].value_counts().plot.pie

I want to use the colormap "cool" to color this so it matches my other visualizations, is this possible or am I oversimplifying? Do I need to assign a color to each region or can I somehow just add a colormap='cool' somewhere in here? New to visualizations here...

Answer 1

When not plotting straight from pandas, pie uses the colors argument, which takes a list of color codes.

You can retrieve color codes from some matplotlib colormaps using plt.cm.desired_colormap_name.colors

For example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

s = pd.Series([1,2,3,4,5])
plt.pie(s, colors=plt.cm.Pastel2.colors)
plt.show()

Colormap names here: https://matplotlib.org/stable/tutorials/colors/colormaps.html

Answer 2

You can pass the argument cmap='cool' to the .pie method. Here's an example:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd

s = pd.Series([1,2,3,4,5])
s.plot.pie(cmap='cool')
plt.show()