Matplotlib 2.x By Example

Indicating statistical significance

For journals that are following the formatting guidelines from the American Psychological Association (APA) or the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), we can use asterisks to indicate statistical significance in plots. Here is a table that summarizes the notation at different levels of P value, and in general, no more than four asterisks are allowed:

Symbol	P value
ns	>0.05
*	≤ 0.05
**	≤ 0.01
***	≤ 0.001

 

Neither Matplotlib nor Seaborn provides a way to annotate statistical significance easily, so we need to do that on our own. First, we need to construct brackets using Matplotlib.Axes.plot, followed by the addition of text annotations using Matplotlib.Axes.text. Please take a look at ...