I have data as those ones
a b c d e
alpha 5.51 0.60 -0.12 26.90 76284.53
beta 3.39 0.94 -0.17 -0.20 -0.2
Have you seen this example? It's for a broken y-axis plot in matplotlib.
Hope this helps.
Combining with pandas this gives:
import pandas as pd
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
from StringIO import StringIO
data = """\
a b c d e
alpha 5.51 0.60 -0.12 26.90 76284.53
beta 3.39 0.94 -0.17 -0.20 -0.20
gamma 7.98 3.34 -1.41 7.74 28394.93
delta 2.29 1.24 0.40 0.29 0.28
"""
df = pd.read_csv(StringIO(data), sep='\s+')
f, axis = plt.subplots(2, 1, sharex=True)
df.plot(kind='bar', ax=axis[0])
df.plot(kind='bar', ax=axis[1])
axis[0].set_ylim(20000, 80000)
axis[1].set_ylim(-2, 30)
axis[1].legend().set_visible(False)
axis[0].spines['bottom'].set_visible(False)
axis[1].spines['top'].set_visible(False)
axis[0].xaxis.tick_top()
axis[0].tick_params(labeltop='off')
axis[1].xaxis.tick_bottom()
d = .015
kwargs = dict(transform=axis[0].transAxes, color='k', clip_on=False)
axis[0].plot((-d,+d),(-d,+d), **kwargs)
axis[0].plot((1-d,1+d),(-d,+d), **kwargs)
kwargs.update(transform=axis[1].transAxes)
axis[1].plot((-d,+d),(1-d,1+d), **kwargs)
axis[1].plot((1-d,1+d),(1-d,1+d), **kwargs)
plt.show()