doc/whatsnew/v0.7.0.rst
This is a major release from 0.6. The main new feature is :func:swarmplot which implements the beeswarm approach for drawing categorical scatterplots. There are also some performance improvements, bug fixes, and updates for compatibility with new versions of dependencies.
Added the :func:swarmplot function, which draws beeswarm plots. These are categorical scatterplots, similar to those produced by :func:stripplot, but position of the points on the categorical axis is chosen to avoid overlapping points. See the :ref:categorical plot tutorial <categorical_tutorial> for more information.
Changed some of the :func:stripplot defaults to be closer to :func:swarmplot. Points are now somewhat smaller, have no outlines, and are not split by default when using hue. These settings remain customizable through function parameters.
Added an additional rule when determining category order in categorical plots. Now, when numeric variables are used in a categorical role, the default behavior is to sort the unique levels of the variable (i.e they will be in proper numerical order). This can still be overridden by the appropriate {*_}order parameter, and variables with a category datatype will still follow the category order even if the levels are strictly numerical.
Changed how :func:stripplot draws points when using hue nesting with split=False so that the different hue levels are not drawn strictly on top of each other.
Improve performance for large dendrograms in :func:clustermap.
Added font.size to the plotting context definition so that the default output from plt.text will be scaled appropriately.
Fixed a bug in :func:clustermap when fastcluster is not installed.
Fixed a bug in the zscore calculation in :func:clustermap.
Fixed a bug in :func:distplot where sometimes the default number of bins would not be an integer.
Fixed a bug in :func:stripplot where a legend item would not appear for a hue level if there were no observations in the first group of points.
Heatmap colorbars are now rasterized for better performance in vector plots.
Added workarounds for some matplotlib boxplot issues, such as strange colors of outlier points.
Added workarounds for an issue where violinplot edges would be missing or have random colors.
Added a workaround for an issue where only one :func:heatmap cell would be annotated on some matplotlib backends.
Fixed a bug on newer versions of matplotlib where a colormap would be erroneously applied to scatterplots with only three observations.
Updated seaborn for compatibility with matplotlib 1.5.
Added compatibility for various IPython (and Jupyter) versions in functions that use widgets.