Qiskit histogram to Seaborn

Question

I am running certain circuits in the Aer simulators and I need to present them nicely. I prefer to use the options provided by Seaborn. How can I transfer my Aer data, e.g. histograms, to Seaborn?

For example, running the simple circuit:

meas = QuantumCircuit(3, 3)
meas.barrier(range(3))
 
meas.measure(range(3), range(3))


circ.add_register(meas.cregs[0])
qc = circ.compose(meas)

qc.draw()

and using Aer

backend_sim = Aer.get_backend('qasm_simulator')
job_sim = backend_sim.run(transpile(qc, backend_sim), shots=1024)
result_sim = job_sim.result()
counts = result_sim.get_counts(qc)
from qiskit.visualization import plot_histogram
plot_histogram(counts)

yields:

However, I prefer to use the stylistic options of Seaborn instead in order to make nice plots.

Answer 1

The counts variable in your code example is just a dictionary with bit strings for keys and the count of times that bit string was returned from the execution of the circuit. Something like: {"000": 513, "111": 467}. If you want to make your own plot with seaborn you can just access the data from the Counts object directly. For example, something like:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import seaborn

counts = {"000": 513, "111": 467}
seaborn.barplot(list(counts.keys()), list(counts.values()))

yields:

That being said plot_histogram function does have some style arguments including for color: https://qiskit.org/documentation/stubs/qiskit.visualization.plot_histogram.html that may enable you to get the output visualization you want from the function.