Place Matplotlib Errorbars Not In Center Of Bar

I'm generating a stacked bar graph in Matplotlib with errorbars. Unfortunately, some of the tiers are relatively small and the data diverse, so that the errorbars of several tiers

Solution 1:

Thanks to tcaswell's comment, I figured it out: The trick is to not include the errorbars in the bar (via the yerr kword), but plot the bar and errorbar separately. This way you can specify the x and y location of the errorbar.

It also helps clearness to plot the errorbars upwards only using yerr= numpy.vstack([[0]*len(std), std]).

Incorporated into the plotting function from here my code looks like this:

for j in range(set_count):
    tmp_accum = numpy.zeros(len(props[0]))
    for k in range(len(props)):
        ax1.bar(ind + j*b_width, props[k][set_label==j], width=b_width, color=color_sets[j][k], bottom=tmp_accum[set_label==j],label=labels[k])
        ax1.errorbar(ind + j*b_width +(1+k)*0.01, props[k][set_label==j]+tmp_accum[set_label==j],yerr= numpy.vstack([[0]*1, std_devs[k][j]]), ecolor="black",elinewidth =3)
        tmp_accum += props[k]