My matplotlib pyplot has too many xticks - it is currently showing each year and month for a 15-year period, e.g. "2001-01", but I only want the x-axis to show the year (e.g. 2001).
The output will be a line graph where x-axis shows dates and the y-axis shows the sale and rent prices.
# Defining the variables
ts1 = prices['Month'] # eg. "2001-01" and so on
ts2 = prices['Sale']
ts3 = prices['Rent']
# Reading '2001-01' as year and month
ts1 = [dt.datetime.strptime(d,'%Y-%m').date() for d in ts1]
plt.figure(figsize=(13, 9))
# Below is where it goes wrong. I don't know how to set xticks to show each year.
plt.xticks(ts1, rotation='vertical')
plt.xlabel('Year')
plt.ylabel('Price')
plt.plot(ts1, ts2, 'r-', ts1, ts3, 'b.-')
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()
Try removing the plt.xticks function call altogether. matplotlib will then use the default AutoDateLocator function to find the optimum tick locations.
Alternatively if the default includes some months which you don't want then you can use matplotlib.dates.YearLocator which will force the ticks to be years only.
You can set the locator as shown below in a quick example:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdate
import numpy as np
import datetime as dt
x = [dt.datetime.utcnow() + dt.timedelta(days=i) for i in range(1000)]
y = range(len(x))
plt.plot(x, y)
locator = mdate.YearLocator()
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(locator)
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()
You can do this with plt.xticks.
As an example, here I have set the xticks frequency to display every three indices. In your case, you would probably want to do so every twelve indices.
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
x = np.arange(10)
y = np.random.randn(10)
plt.plot(x,y)
plt.xticks(np.arange(min(x), max(x)+1, 3))
plt.show()
In your case, since you are using dates, you can replace the argument of the second to last line above with something like ts1[0::12], which will select every 12th element from ts1 or np.arange(0, len(dates), 12) which will select every 12th index corresponding to the ticks you want to show.
Related
I have 2 dfs. One of them has data for a month. Another one, averages for the past quarters. I wanna plot the averages in front of the monthly data. How can I do it? Please note that I am trying to plot averages as dots and monthly as line chart.
So far my best result was achieved by ax1=ax.twiny(), but still not ideal result as data point appear in throughout the chart, rather than just in front.
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
from matplotlib.ticker import ScalarFormatter, FormatStrFormatter, FuncFormatter
import matplotlib.ticker as ticker
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
date_base = pd.date_range(start='1/1/2018', end='1/30/2018')
df_base = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(30,4), columns=list("ABCD"), index=date_base)
date_ext = pd.date_range(start='1/1/2017', end='1/1/2018', freq="Q")
df_ext = pd.DataFrame(np.random.randn(4,4), columns=list("ABCD"), index=date_ext)
def drawChartsPlt(df_base, df_ext):
fig = plt.figure(figsize=(10,5))
ax = fig.add_subplot(111)
number_of_plots = len(df_base.columns)
LINE_STYLES = ['-', '--', '-.', 'dotted']
colormap = plt.cm.nipy_spectral
ax.set_prop_cycle("color", [colormap(i) for i in np.linspace(0,1,number_of_plots)])
date_base = df_base.index
date_base = [i.strftime("%Y-%m-%d") for i in date_base]
q_ends = df_ext.index
q_ends = [i.strftime("%Y-%m-%d") for i in q_ends]
date_base.insert(0, "") #to shift xticks so they match chart
date_base += q_ends
for i in range(number_of_plots):
df_base.ix[:-3, df_base.columns[i]].plot(kind="line", linestyle=LINE_STYLES[i%2], subplots=False, ax=ax)
#ax.set_xticks(date_base)
#ax.set_xticklabels(date_base)
# ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.MultipleLocator(20))
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(ticker.LinearLocator(len(date_base)))
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(plt.FixedFormatter(date_base))
fig.autofmt_xdate()
# ax1=ax.twinx()
ax1=ax.twiny()
ax1.set_prop_cycle("color", [colormap(i) for i in np.linspace(0,1,number_of_plots)])
for i in range(len(df_ext.columns)):
ax1.scatter(x=df_ext.index, y=df_ext[df_ext.columns[i]])
ax.set_title("Test")
#plt.minorticks_off())
ax.minorticks_off()
#ax1.minorticks_off()
#ax1.set_xticklabels(date_base)
#ax1.set_xticklabels(q_ends)
ax.legend(loc="center left", bbox_to_anchor=(1,0.5))
ax.xaxis.label.set_size(12)
plt.xlabel("TEST X Label")
plt.ylabel("TEST Y Label")
ax1.set_xlabel("Quarters")
plt.show()
drawChartsPlt(df_base, df_ext)
The way I ended up coding it is by saving quarterly index of df_ext to a temp variable, overwriting it with dates that are close to df_base.index using pd.date_range(start=df_base.index[-1], periods=len(df_ext), freq='D'), and the finally setting the dates that I need with ax.set_xticklabels(list(date_base)+list(date_ext)).
It looks like it could be achieved using broken axes as indicated Break // in x axis of matplotlib and Python/Matplotlib - Is there a way to make a discontinuous axis?, but I haven't tried that solution.
I'm having trouble limiting the number of dates on the x-axis to make them legible. I need to plot the word length vs the year but the number of years is too large for the plot size.
The Issue:
Any help is appreciated.
As mentioned in the comments, use datetime (if your dates are in string format, you can easily convert them to datetime). Once you do that it should automatically display years along the x-axis. If you need to change the frequency of ticks to every year (or anything else), you can use mdates, like so:
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import datetime
import math
start = datetime.datetime.strptime("01-01-2000", "%d-%m-%Y")
end = datetime.datetime.strptime("10-04-2019", "%d-%m-%Y")
x = [start + datetime.timedelta(days=x) for x in range(0, (end-start).days)]
y = [math.sqrt(x) for x in range(len(x))]
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x, y)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.YearLocator())
fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()
The snippet above generates the following:
This code plots the data exactly as I want with the dates on the x-axis and the times on the y-axis. However I want the y-axis to show every hour on the hour (e.g., 00, 01, ... 23) and the x-axis to show the beginning of every month at an angle so there's no overlap (the actual data being used spans over a year) and only once, since this code repeats the same months. How is this accomplished?
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
data = ['2018-01-01 09:28:52', '2018-01-03 13:02:44', '2018-01-03 15:30:27', '2018-02-04 11:55:09']
f, ax = plt.subplots()
data = pd.to_datetime(data, yearfirst=True)
ax.plot(data.date, data.time, '.')
ax.set_ylim(["00:00:00", "23:59:59"])
days = mdates.DayLocator()
d_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m')
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(days)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(d_fmt)
plt.show()
UPDATE: This fixes the x axis.
# Monthly intervals on x axis
months = mdates.MonthLocator()
d_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m')
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(months)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(d_fmt)
However, this attempt to fix the y axis just makes it blank.
# Hourly intervals on y axis
hours = mdates.HourLocator()
t_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%H')
ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(hours)
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(t_fmt)
I'm reading these docs but not understanding my error: https://matplotlib.org/api/dates_api.html, https://matplotlib.org/api/ticker_api.html
Matplotlib cannot plot times without corresponding date. This would make is necessary to add some arbitrary date (in the below case I took the 1st of january 2018) to the times. One may use datetime.datetime.combine for that purpose.
timetodatetime = lambda x:dt.datetime.combine(dt.date(2018, 1, 1), x)
time = list(map(timetodatetime, data.time))
ax.plot(data.date, time, '.')
Then the code from the question using HourLocator() would work fine. Finally, setting the limits on the axes would also require to use datetime objects,
ax.set_ylim([dt.datetime(2018,1,1,0), dt.datetime(2018,1,2,0)])
Complete example:
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import datetime as dt
data = ['2018-01-01 09:28:52', '2018-01-03 13:02:44', '2018-01-03 15:30:27',
'2018-02-04 11:55:09']
f, ax = plt.subplots()
data = pd.to_datetime(data, yearfirst=True)
timetodatetime = lambda x:dt.datetime.combine(dt.date(2018, 1, 1), x)
time = list(map(timetodatetime, data.time))
ax.plot(data.date, time, '.')
# Monthly intervals on x axis
months = mdates.MonthLocator()
d_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%Y-%m')
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(months)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(d_fmt)
## Hourly intervals on y axis
hours = mdates.HourLocator()
t_fmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%H')
ax.yaxis.set_major_locator(hours)
ax.yaxis.set_major_formatter(t_fmt)
ax.set_ylim([dt.datetime(2018,1,1,0), dt.datetime(2018,1,2,0)])
plt.show()
I'm basically trying to plot a graph where the x axis represent the month of the year. The data is stored in a numpy.array, with dimensions k x months. Here it follows a minimal example (my data is not this crazy):
import numpy
import matplotlib
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
cmap = plt.get_cmap('Set3')
colors = [cmap(i) for i in numpy.linspace(0, 1, len(complaints))]
data = numpy.random.rand(18,12)
y = range(data.shape[1])
plt.figure(figsize=(15, 7), dpi=200)
for i in range(data.shape[0]):
plt.plot(y, data[i,:], color=colors[i], linewidth=5)
plt.legend(loc='center left', bbox_to_anchor=(1, 0.5))
plt.xticks(numpy.arange(0, 12, 1))
plt.xlabel('Hour of the Day')
plt.ylabel('Number of Complaints')
plt.title('Number of Complaints per Hour in 2015')
I'd like to have the xticks as strings instead of numbers. I'm wondering if I have to create a list of strings, manually, or if there is another way to translate the numbers to months. I have to do the same for weekdays, for example.
I've been looking to these examples:
http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/finance_demo.html
http://matplotlib.org/examples/pylab_examples/date_demo2.html
But I'm not using datetime.
Althought this answer works well, for this case you can avoid defining your own FuncFormatter by using the pre-defined ones from matplotlib for dates, by using matplotlib.dates rather than matplotlib.ticker:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
# Define time range with 12 different months:
# `MS` stands for month start frequency
x_data = pd.date_range('2018-01-01', periods=12, freq='MS')
# Check how this dates looks like:
print(x_data)
y_data = np.random.rand(12)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x_data, y_data)
# Make ticks on occurrences of each month:
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.MonthLocator())
# Get only the month to show in the x-axis:
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%b'))
# '%b' means month as locale’s abbreviated name
plt.show()
Obtaining:
DatetimeIndex(['2018-01-01', '2018-02-01', '2018-03-01', '2018-04-01',
'2018-05-01', '2018-06-01', '2018-07-01', '2018-08-01',
'2018-09-01', '2018-10-01', '2018-11-01', '2018-12-01'],
dtype='datetime64[ns]', freq='MS')
This is an alternative plotting method plot_date, which you might want to use if your independent variable are datetime like, instead of using the more general plot method:
import datetime
data = np.random.rand(24)
#a list of time: 00:00:00 to 23:00:00
times = [datetime.datetime.strptime(str(i), '%H') for i in range(24)]
#'H' controls xticklabel format, 'H' means only the hours is shown
#day, year, week, month, etc are not shown
plt.plot_date(times, data, fmt='H')
plt.setp(plt.gca().xaxis.get_majorticklabels(),
'rotation', 90)
The benefit of it is that now you can easily control the density of xticks, if we want to have a tick every hour, we will insert these lines after plot_date:
##import it if not already imported
#import matplotlib.dates as mdates
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.HourLocator())
You can still use formatters to format your results in the way you want. For example, to have month names printed, let us first define a function taking an integer to a month abbreviation:
def getMonthName(month_number):
testdate=datetime.date(2010,int(month_number),1)
return testdate.strftime('%b')
Here, I have created an arbitrary date with the correct month and returned that month. Check the datetime documentation for available format codes if needed. If that is always easier than just setting a list by hand is another question. Now let us plot some monthly testdata:
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as mtick
import numpy as np
x_data=np.arange(1,12.5,1)
y_data=x_data**2 # Just some arbitrary data
plt.plot(x_data,y_data)
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(mtick.FixedLocator(x_data)) # Set tick locations
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(mtick.FuncFormatter(lambda x,p:getMonthName(x)))
plt.show()
The message here is that you can use matplotlib.ticker.FuncFormatter to use any function to obtain a tick label. The function takes two arguments (value and position) and returns a string.
I'm trying to build matplotlib charts whose x-axis is a dateIndex from a pandas dataframe. Trying to mimic some examples from matplotlib, I've been unsuccessful. The xaxis ticks and labels never appear.
I thought maybe matplotlib wasn't properly digesting the pandas index, so I converted it to ordinal with the matplotlib date2num helper function, but that gave the same result.
# https://matplotlib.org/api/dates_api.html
# https://matplotlib.org/examples/api/date_demo.html
import datetime as dt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
import matplotlib.cbook as cbook
import matplotlib.dates as mpd
years = mdates.YearLocator() # every year
months = mdates.MonthLocator() # every month
yearsFmt = mdates.DateFormatter('%Y')
majorLocator = years
majorFormatter = yearsFmt #FormatStrFormatter('%d')
minorLocator = months
y1 = np.arange(100)*0.14+1
y2 = -(np.arange(100)*0.04)+12
"""neither of these indices works"""
x = pd.date_range(start='4/1/2012', periods=len(y1))
#x = map(mpd.date2num, pd.date_range(start='4/1/2012', periods=len(y1)))
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x,y1)
ax.plot(x,y2)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(years)
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(yearsFmt)
ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(months)
datemin = x[0]
datemax = x[-1]
ax.set_xlim(datemin, datemax)
fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()
The problem is the following. pd.date_range(start='4/1/2012', periods=len(y1)) creates dates from the first of April 2012 to the 9th of July 2012.
Now you set the major locator to be a YearLocator. This means, that you want to have a tick for each year on the axis. However, all dates are within the same year 2012. So there is no major tick to be shown within the plot range.
The suggestion would be to use a MonthLocator instead, such that the first of each month is ticked. Also if would make sense to use a formatter, which actually shows the months, e.g. '%b %Y'. You may use a DayLocator for the minor ticks, if you want, to show the small tickmarks for each day.
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.MonthLocator())
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%b %Y'))
ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(mdates.DayLocator())
Complete example:
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as mdates
y1 = np.arange(100)*0.14+1
y2 = -(np.arange(100)*0.04)+12
x = pd.date_range(start='4/1/2012', periods=len(y1))
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(x,y1)
ax.plot(x,y2)
ax.xaxis.set_major_locator(mdates.MonthLocator())
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mdates.DateFormatter('%b %Y'))
ax.xaxis.set_minor_locator(mdates.DayLocator())
fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()
You could use pd.DataFrame.plot to handle most of that
df = pd.DataFrame(dict(
y1=y1, y2=y2
), index=x)
df.plot()