Plotting a time series?

Question

I have a data set which has dates in the first column, and a "result" integer which is either 1 or 0. The date column was successfully converted to a time object. I tried to plot the values directly using matplotlib’s plot function, but that did not work..
Sample:

    Date       Result
2017-01-06     0.0
2017-01-06     1.0
2017-01-06     0.0
2017-01-07     0.0
2017-01-07     0.0

I tried using df.plot(), but the resulting plot has very undesirable results.

What I want at the end of the day is dates on the x axis, and the "result" on the y axis. Where am I going wrong? What’s wrong with what I’m doing?

Here's the graph

Asked By: RedaBitar

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Source

Answer 1

Please use

df.set_index('Date').plot()

or

df.plot(x='Date', y='Result')

because of the plot by default use index of df as the x-axis, so you should set the ‘Date’ column as the index, or specify which column to use as the x-axis.

see more at pandas.DataFrame.plot

Answered By: heyu91

Answer 2

One common issue is that Date column looks like datetime64 but is actually object. So changing the dtype fixes that issue. N.B. Passing the datetime format= makes the conversion run much, much faster (see this answer for more info).

df['Date'] = pd.to_datetime(df['Date'], format='%Y-%m-%d')
df.plot(x='Date', y='Result', kind='scatter', rot=90)

Answered By: cottontail

Plotting a time series?

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