Represent a continuous graph using `matplotlib` and `pandas`

Question

My dataframe is like this-

   Energy_MWh    Month
0   39686.82    1979-01
1   35388.78    1979-02
2   50134.02    1979-03
3   37499.22    1979-04
4   20104.08    1979-05
5   17440.26    1979-06

It goes on like this to the month 2015-12. So you can imagine all the data.

I want to plot a continuous graph with the months as the x-axis and the Energy_MWh as the y-axis. How to best represent this using matplotlib?

I would also like to know for my knowledge if there's a way to print 1979-01 as Jan-1979 on the x-axis and so on. Probably a lambda function or something while plotting.

Answer 1

Set Month as the index:

df.set_index('Month', inplace=True)

Convert the index to Datetime:

df.index = pd.DatetimeIndex(df.index)

Plot:

df.plot()

Answer 2

Borrowed liberally from this answer, which you should go out and upvote:

from datetime import datetime
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from matplotlib.dates import DateFormatter

df = <set_your_data_frame_here>

myDates = pd.to_datetime(df['Month'])
myValues = df['Energy_MWh']
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(myDates,myValues)

myFmt = DateFormatter("%b-%Y")
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(myFmt)

## Rotate date labels automatically
fig.autofmt_xdate()
plt.show()