Pandas: bar plot with multiIndex dataframe

Question

I have a pandas DataFrame with a TIMESTAMP column (not the index), and the timestamp format is as follows:

2015-03-31 22:56:45.510

Answer 1

The following should work, but it is difficult to test without some data.

Start by resetting your index to get access to the TIMESTAMP column. Then use strftime to format it to your desired text representation (e.g. mm-yy). Finally, reset the index back to AXLES and TIMESTAMP.

df = resamp.reset_index()
df['TIMESTAMP'] = [ts.strftime('%m-%y') for ts in df.TIMESTAMP]
df.set_index(['AXLES', 'TIMESTAMP'], inplace=True)
>>> df.xs(3, level=0).plot(kind='bar')

Answer 2

You could generate and set the labels explicitly using ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter with a ticker.FixedFormatter. This will allow you to keep your DataFrame's MultiIndex with timestamp values, while displaying the timestamps in the desired %m-%Y format:

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

dftest = {'TIMESTAMP':['2014-08-31','2014-09-30','2014-10-31'], 'AXLES':[3, 3, 3], 'CLASS':[5,6,7]}
dfTest = pd.DataFrame(dftest)
dfTest.TIMESTAMP = pd.to_datetime(pd.Series(dfTest.TIMESTAMP))
resamp = dfTest.set_index('TIMESTAMP').groupby('AXLES').resample('M', how='count').CLASS

ax = resamp[3].plot(kind='bar')
ticklabels = [timestamp.strftime('%m-%Y') for axle, timestamp in resamp.index]
ax.xaxis.set_major_formatter(ticker.FuncFormatter(lambda x, pos: ticklabels[int(x)]))
plt.gcf().autofmt_xdate()

plt.show()

yields