matplotlib - Annotate data points while plotting from Pandas DataFrame

Question

I would like to annotate the data points with their values next to the points on the plot. The examples I found only deal with x and y as vectors. However, I would like to do this for a pandas DataFrame that contains multiple columns.

ax = plt.figure().add_subplot(1, 1, 1)
df.plot(ax = ax)
plt.show()

What is the best way to annotate all the points for a multi-column DataFrame?

Answer 1

Here's a (very) slightly slicker version of Dan Allan's answer:

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
import string

df = pd.DataFrame({'x':np.random.rand(10), 'y':np.random.rand(10)}, 
                  index=list(string.ascii_lowercase[:10]))

Which gives:

          x         y
a  0.541974  0.042185
b  0.036188  0.775425
c  0.950099  0.888305
d  0.739367  0.638368
e  0.739910  0.596037
f  0.974529  0.111819
g  0.640637  0.161805
h  0.554600  0.172221
i  0.718941  0.192932
j  0.447242  0.172469

And then:

fig, ax = plt.subplots()
df.plot('x', 'y', kind='scatter', ax=ax)

for k, v in df.iterrows():
    ax.annotate(k, v)

Finally, if you're in interactive mode you might need to refresh the plot:

fig.canvas.draw()

Which produces:

Or, since that looks incredibly ugly, you can beautify things a bit pretty easily:

from matplotlib import cm
cmap = cm.get_cmap('Spectral')
df.plot('x', 'y', kind='scatter', ax=ax, s=120, linewidth=0, 
        c=range(len(df)), colormap=cmap)

for k, v in df.iterrows():
    ax.annotate(k, v,
                xytext=(10,-5), textcoords='offset points',
                family='sans-serif', fontsize=18, color='darkslategrey')

Which looks a lot nicer: