Horizontal axis labels in Matplotlib

In a default Matplotlib plot, the tick labels for both the x- and y-axes are horizontal, but the axis label for the y-axis is vertical:

import numpy as np
rng = np.random.default_rng()

x = np.linspace(0, 9, 10)
y = rng.random(10) + 0.5

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
plt.style.use("seaborn-whitegrid")

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(3, 2))
ax.scatter(x, y)
ax.set(xlabel="Predictor", ylabel="Response")

To make the y-axis label horizontal, which is easier to read, pass in these matplotlib.text.Text properties as additional parameters:

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(3, 2))

ax.scatter(x, y)
ax.set_xlabel("Predictor")
ax.set_ylabel(
    "Response",
    rotation="horizontal",
    horizontalalignment="right",
    verticalalignment="center_baseline",
)

Note that you might have to tweak the alignment parameters until it looks alright.

For a slightly more realistic example, this is what I needed this for in the first place: plotting my change in weight over the last year:

dates = np.arange("2020-03", "2020-11", dtype="datetime64[D]")
weights = (
    2 * np.sin(np.linspace(0, 2 * np.pi, len(dates)))
    + rng.random(len(dates))
)

import matplotlib.dates as mdates
dtloc = mdates.AutoDateLocator()
dtfmt = mdates.ConciseDateFormatter(dtloc)

fig, ax = plt.subplots(figsize=(6, 3))
ax.plot(dates, weights)
ax.set_ylabel(
    "Change\nin weight\n(%)",
    rotation="horizontal",
    horizontalalignment="right",  # label relative to axis
    multialignment="center",      # lines within label
    verticalalignment="center_baseline",
    linespacing=1.5,
)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(dtloc)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(dtfmt)

# Fix bounding box before saving to file.
fig.tight_layout()

Note also the use of matplotlib.dates.ConciseDateFormatter in the above to improve the tick labels for the x axis.