How to do a scatter plot with empty circles in Python?

From the documentation for scatter:

Optional kwargs control the Collection properties; in particular:

    edgecolors:
        The string ‘none’ to plot faces with no outlines
    facecolors:
        The string ‘none’ to plot unfilled outlines

Try the following:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt 
import numpy as np 

x = np.random.randn(60) 
y = np.random.randn(60)

plt.scatter(x, y, s=80, facecolors='none', edgecolors='r')
plt.show()

Note: For other types of plots see this post on the use of markeredgecolor and markerfacecolor.

Would these work?

plt.scatter(np.random.randn(100), np.random.randn(100), facecolors='none')

or using plot()

plt.plot(np.random.randn(100), np.random.randn(100), 'o', mfc='none')

Here's another way: this adds a circle to the current axes, plot or image or whatever :

from matplotlib.patches import Circle  # $matplotlib/patches.py

def circle( xy, radius, color="lightsteelblue", facecolor="none", alpha=1, ax=None ):
    """ add a circle to ax= or current axes
    """
        # from .../pylab_examples/ellipse_demo.py
    e = Circle( xy=xy, radius=radius )
    if ax is None:
        ax = pl.gca()  # ax = subplot( 1,1,1 )
    ax.add_artist(e)
    e.set_clip_box(ax.bbox)
    e.set_edgecolor( color )
    e.set_facecolor( facecolor )  # "none" not None
    e.set_alpha( alpha )

(The circles in the picture get squashed to ellipses because imshow aspect="auto" ).

In matplotlib 2.0 there is a parameter called fillstyle which allows better control on the way markers are filled. In my case I have used it with errorbars but it works for markers in general http://matplotlib.org/api/_as_gen/matplotlib.axes.Axes.errorbar.html

fillstyle accepts the following values: [‘full’ | ‘left’ | ‘right’ | ‘bottom’ | ‘top’ | ‘none’]

There are two important things to keep in mind when using fillstyle,

1) If mfc is set to any kind of value it will take priority, hence, if you did set fillstyle to 'none' it would not take effect. So avoid using mfc in conjuntion with fillstyle

2) You might want to control the marker edge width (using markeredgewidth or mew) because if the marker is relatively small and the edge width is thick, the markers will look like filled even though they are not.

Following is an example using errorbars:

myplot.errorbar(x=myXval, y=myYval, yerr=myYerrVal, fmt='o', fillstyle='none', ecolor='blue',  mec='blue')