matplotlib - Pandas bar plot changes date format

Question

I have a simple stacked line plot that has exactly the date format I want magically set when using the following code.

df_ts = df.resample("W", how='max')
df_ts.plot(figsize=(12,8), stacked=True)

However, the dates mysteriously transform themselves to an ugly and unreadable format when plotting the same data as a bar plot.

df_ts = df.resample("W", how='max')
df_ts.plot(kind='bar', figsize=(12,8), stacked=True)

The original data was transformed a bit to have the weekly max. Why is this radical change in automatically set dates happening? How can I have the nicely formatted dates as above?

Here is some dummy data

start = pd.to_datetime("1-1-2012")
idx = pd.date_range(start, periods= 365).tolist()
df=pd.DataFrame({'A':np.random.random(365), 'B':np.random.random(365)})
df.index = idx
df_ts = df.resample('W', how= 'max')
df_ts.plot(kind='bar', stacked=True)

Answer 1

The plotting code assumes that each bar in a bar plot deserves its own label. You could override this assumption by specifying your own formatter:

ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(formatter)

The pandas.tseries.converter.TimeSeries_DateFormatter that Pandas uses to format the dates in the "good" plot works well with line plots when the x-values are dates. However, with a bar plot the x-values (at least those received by TimeSeries_DateFormatter.__call__) are merely integers starting at zero. If you try to use TimeSeries_DateFormatter with a bar plot, all the labels thus start at the Epoch, 1970-1-1 UTC, since this is the date which corresponds to zero. So the formatter used for line plots is unfortunately useless for bar plots (at least as far as I can see).

The easiest way I see to produce the desired formatting is to generate and set the labels explicitly:

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

start = pd.to_datetime("5-1-2012")
idx = pd.date_range(start, periods= 365)
df = pd.DataFrame({'A':np.random.random(365), 'B':np.random.random(365)})
df.index = idx
df_ts = df.resample('W', how= 'max')

ax = df_ts.plot(kind='bar', x=df_ts.index, stacked=True)

# Make most of the ticklabels empty so the labels don't get too crowded
ticklabels = ['']*len(df_ts.index)
# Every 4th ticklable shows the month and day
ticklabels[::4] = [item.strftime('%b %d') for item in df_ts.index[::4]]
# Every 12th ticklabel includes the year
ticklabels[::12] = [item.strftime('%b %d
%Y') for item in df_ts.index[::12]]
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(ticker.FixedFormatter(ticklabels))
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()

plt.show()

yields

---

For those looking for a simple example of a bar plot with dates:

import numpy as np
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.ticker as mticker

dates = pd.date_range('2012-1-1', '2017-1-1', freq='M')
df = pd.DataFrame({'A':np.random.random(len(dates)), 'Date':dates})
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
df.plot.bar(x='Date', y='A', ax=ax)
ticklabels = ['']*len(df)
skip = len(df)//12
ticklabels[::skip] = df['Date'].iloc[::skip].dt.strftime('%Y-%m-%d')
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(mticker.FixedFormatter(ticklabels))
fig.autofmt_xdate()

# fixes the tracker
# https://matplotlib.org/users/recipes.html
def fmt(x, pos=0, max_i=len(ticklabels)-1):
    i = int(x) 
    i = 0 if i < 0 else max_i if i > max_i else i
    return dates[i]
ax.fmt_xdata = fmt
plt.show()