Python plot shows numbers instead of Dates on x axis

Question

I'm trying to plot a stock chart. My DataFrame structure looks like this:

<class 'pandas.core.frame.DataFrame'>
Int64Index: 503 entries, 0 to 506
Data columns (total 6 columns):
Date      503 non-null object
Open      503 non-null float64
High      503 non-null float64
Low       503 non-null float64
Close     503 non-null float64
Volume    503 non-null float64
dtypes: float64(5), object(1)
memory usage: 27.5+ KB

When I try to plot the data using the Close-column I get numbers on the x axis, but I want to plot it with the dates using 3 month ticks. How can I achieve that?

At the moment the code for the plot looks like this:

dax_data["Close"].plot(label = "Dax Close", figsize = (16,8), title = "Dax Prices")
plt.legend();

Here you can see the plot

jlesueur · Accepted Answer · 2019-11-15 17:18:25Z

2

That's because "DataFrame.plot()' use by default the dataframe index as x values. You should do like this :

dax_data.plot(x = 'Date', y = 'Close', label = "Dax Close", figsize = (16,8), title = "Dax Prices")

And to have 3 month ticks :

import matplotlib.dates as mdates

### Your code to get dax_data

ax = dax_data.plot(x = 'Date', y = 'Close', label = "Dax Close", figsize = (16,8), title = "Dax Prices")
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.MonthLocator(interval = 3)) # to display ticks every 3 months
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter("%m-%Y")) # to set how dates are displayed
plt.legend()

edited Nov 15, 2019 at 17:18

answered Nov 15, 2019 at 17:09

jlesueur

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1 Comment

BeginnerGinner Over a year ago

Great. Thank you. That's exactly what I was looking for.

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