Drop the date from a matplotlib time series plot

Question

I have a simple time series plot in Pandas, that can be emulated by the following code below:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, date
import time
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt

df2 = pd.DataFrame({'A' : np.random.rand(1440).cumsum()}, index = pd.date_range('1/1/2015', periods=1440, freq='1min'))

df2.A.plot()

Which generates the following graph:

My problem is that the date displayed is not relevant to the graph itself and I wish to remove it and leave only the time series on the x axis.

How do I do this?

Answer 1

you can use matplotlib.dates and its HourLocator to set the date/time formatting:

import pandas as pd
import numpy as np
from datetime import datetime, timedelta, date
import time
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import matplotlib.dates as dates

df2 = pd.DataFrame({'A' : np.random.rand(1440).cumsum()}, index = pd.date_range('1/1/2015', periods=1440, freq='1min'))

df2.A.plot()
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_locator(dates.HourLocator())
plt.gca().xaxis.set_major_formatter(dates.DateFormatter('%H:%M'))

plt.show()